


Death Scenes

by avocadomoon



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Post-Canon Fix-It, Resurrection, Temporary Character Death, Turtle Gods and Our Feelings About Them, woke up in a different body
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:55:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 40,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25567048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/avocadomoon/pseuds/avocadomoon
Summary: Is he dead? He could be dead. Eddie squints his eyes shut and tries to wrap his head around it. He doesn'tfeeldead, not that that means anything. If the afterlife really turns out to be some guy named Tim, that would be really fucked up.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 49
Kudos: 247





	Death Scenes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [falsettodrop](https://archiveofourown.org/users/falsettodrop/gifts).



> well this is deeply weird, and I apologize. I hope you like it anyway, falsettodrop! Warnings for temporary character death (as tagged), suicide ideation/mentions, some intense feelings of body dysphoria, and some very unethical therapeutic practices (unintentional on Eddie's part, I promise).

Eddie's always used alarms to wake up, even on his days off, or back in the summers between college semesters, when the only thing on his agenda every day was jerking off and avoiding his mother and occasionally, meal planning. His first alarm clock was a Nickelodeon Time Blaster that he won in a raffle at Dairy Queen when he was twelve, which he used faithfully every morning to wake up for school until it finally broke in ninth grade, to be replaced with a much more serious grown up clock radio, a birthday present from his aunt that Richie covered in puffy glitter stickers (shoplifted from the drugstore, just because) one afternoon when Eddie wasn't looking.

With the advent of cell phones, this habit has gotten much easier to manage, not to mention less obtrusive - Eddie is marginally self-aware, thank you, he knows very well what an annoying roommate he was - since he also sleeps like a rock, and thus needs like three or four to actually wake up. Myra never minded this very much - or if she did, she never said anything - back when they were still sharing a bed, which lasted approximately eight months into their marriage before they moved into the condo and got separate bedrooms. 

So it's a surreal experience to wake up slowly, to say the least. Years of beating his own circadian rhythms into submission have ensured that Eddie wakes up violently, or not at all - and so the gentle, slow process of coming back to consciousness, after a very deep sleep, is more disturbing than anything else. Eddie feels like he's still dreaming a little, blinking his eyes open to an unfamiliar ceiling. There's a strip of bright sunlight on the foot of the bed, warming his feet, and the bed he's lying in smells like fresh detergent. Somewhere in a room nearby, there's music playing. Eddie yawns, reaching up to scratch his chest, and realizes he's not wearing a shirt, which is the first moment that he realizes something's off. Eddie hasn't gone to bed without clothes on in years, which is a holdover from the days when his mother used to barge into his bedroom without warning in the middle of the night because she "thought she heard him cough."

"Fuck," Eddie says, blinking the sleep from his eyes. There's a weird, heavy sensation to his limbs - not like he's been drugged, but it feels like something's off, like he doesn't fit in his own body. His eyes go wide as he registers the room he's in, which he doesn't recognize - blue wallpaper, a patio door that leads to a balcony. He can hear a car engine from outside, somewhere close. The bed has maroon sheets on it, and Eddie doesn't remember how he got here. 

Sitting up cautiously, Eddie peels his ears, trying to hear if there's anyone close by, but the sound from the other side of the closed wooden door is obviously a radio, echoing through what sounds like an empty hallway. There's a nightstand next to the bed, and Eddie fumbles through the detritus on it - an empty water glass, a bottle of ibuprofen, a couple of creased mass market mysteries - trying to see if his phone is anywhere close by but he gets distracted by his own hand, which is much thicker and hairier than he remembers it being the last time he saw it. Then he looks down at his own chest, and inhales in startled panic so sharply he chokes, and promptly falls out of the bed. 

Tangled in the sheets on the floor, Eddie registers a few things: one is that he's much tanner than he should be, and two is that his dick is smaller, which is fairly nightmarish. He's in a pair of blue boxers that he's never seen before and nothing else, and he's suddenly got hair all down his arms, thick and blond and much coarser than the thin brown hair that he should have, on his _actual_ body, which Eddie is starting to realize is currently absent. Covering his face with his hands ("his" being a relative concept currently in flux, apparently), Eddie does a few deep breathing exercises while he catalogues the other differences: his body feels heavier, his hands have weird calluses on them, his left knee aches, and his throat is kind of sore, like he's been sleeping with a fan on. He also has to pee, and with every slow, deep breath Eddie can feel the strangeness of his ("his") body, the way his torso _feels_ different, the breadth of his shoulders as they lay against the carpet is all wrong, even the pads of his feet feel different, warped through a funhouse mirror, awkward and strange. Eddie breathes through a panic attack there on the floor, keeping his eyes closed as he fights off the crushing feeling of hysteria that he remembers from his nightmares - the panicky feeling of being trapped, a hand holding his head down and grinding his face into the dirt, clammy hands on his arms, a steel bar door slamming shut in front of his face. 

He stays there for a long time, trying to breathe. The boxers are wet with sweat by the time he feels stable enough to open his eyes again. 

So: it's a weird situation. Eddie gropes around the bedroom in blank confusion, trying hard not to look at himself or think too hard about anything, half-hoping that he's still dreaming and about to wake up any minute. There's a bookshelf against the wall crammed full of worn paperbacks, and a small closet with some clothes and spare towels. On the other side of the door, the radio is still playing, and whatever apartment he's in seems to be close to a major road, since Eddie can hear the traffic through the window. He crawls to the bathroom and attempts to splash water on his face without looking at his reflection in the mirror, which doesn't work. He takes one look at his ("his") face, and almost has another panic attack. 

"Fuck, fuck, fuck," he says, leaning his ("his") forehead against the cool counter, still trying to keep his breathing even. He's in a nightmare. It's a nightmare. He's going to wake up soon. This is nuts. 

He takes inventory of himself slowly, there on the bathroom floor. His body is stockier, a little heavier than he's used to. His tan looks natural, with tan lines on his upper thighs - hairier than Eddie's too, just like the arms - from shorts. His face - Jesus Christ - his _new_ face isn't anyone he recognizes - his nose is wider, and his face is more square shaped, with a few pockmarks on one side, like acne that scarred. He has laugh lines around his eyes and mouth and a light beard, which itches. His eyebrows are thinner, and ungroomed. There's a piercing in his left ear - only the left - but no earring, and a small tattoo on his right wrist of a plus and a minus sign, which Eddie stares at in abject bewilderment for a full ten minutes. 

"Okay," Eddie says, after he knocks his head against the wall a few dozen times, closing and opening his eyes over and over, hoping to wake himself up. "So I've lost it. I'm a crazy person." He says this out loud, hoping for some actual dream stuff to start happening, like his third grade teacher popping into existence in the bathroom to scold him for turning in his worksheets late, or a crowd of zombie lepers suddenly tearing through the walls - a recurring one that Eddie's been having for about ten years that he never really understood, until he went back to Derry and remembered everything. 

Derry. Shit. Eddie climbs to his feet, suddenly remembering the crack in Bev's voice as she stood there in the lobby of the motel, one pale hand pressed against her lips. Stan's shower caps, crinkling in Eddie's pocket as he walked. The long, lean line of Richie's shoulders, angled toward Eddie like an invitation, in the dim light of the restaurant. 

The last thing he remembers is walking into the pharmacy - a dim memory of a grown up Greta Keene, still just as bitchy and permed as she'd been in 1990, chomping her gum at him in the snack aisle. He has a vague sense of being with the others again - holding Ben's hand, somewhere dark? Not the motel, though - but from there, it's just a blank. Eddie sits on the edge of the unfamiliar bed, in this unfamiliar body, and considers going back to sleep for awhile, just to see if he'll wake up as himself again. But with every minute that passes, it feels realer than ever. The solidness of his body, the physicality of the room, the carpet beneath his feet, the smell of the bedsheets, the warmth of the sunlight - if Eddie is dreaming, he's never had one like this before. He doesn't know what to do. 

The radio in the hallway is on a talk DJ now, loud and gregarious, the sort of goofy morning show that Eddie's always hated on principle. Dimly, through the door, Eddie hears him announce a 'countdown to Halloween,' which makes his heart freeze. It's summer. Isn't it? It's fucking _July._

This, more than anything else, prompts Eddie into action. There are clothes in the closet that fit him ("him"), and no cell phone that he can see, but there is a wallet on top of a stack of books on the bookshelf, well-worn and creased by a stack of credit cards. Eddie puts on a t-shirt and some pants - he'll tackle changing out of these boxers once he feels emotionally ready to confront his new penis, thank you - and flips through it cautiously, finding a California driver's license on top, behind a grungy plastic sleeve. The name is _Timothy Beaumont,_ the date of birth is only three months behind Eddie's, and the picture matches the face that Eddie is currently wearing. Breathing heavily, Eddie leans against the bookshelf, closing his eyes and counting to twenty one last time, the panicky waves from earlier still sloshing around in his brain like old sewer water. 

In the hallway, a clock radio is sitting on a windowsill that seems to lead to some sort of half-patio, with a thin door that opens out onto a small stone outcropping with an old lawn chair, and a metal table with a dirty ashtray on it. Eddie pokes his head outside and realizes he's on the top floor of a building; the patio is obviously a repurposed patch of roof, and he can see the windows of other apartments in the building across the street. As he watches, a little kid pokes her head out of a window directly across, opening the window pane and leaning her elbows against the edge. She catches sight of Eddie and waves, and not knowing what else to do, Eddie waves back. 

He feels weird after that, as if being acknowledged by another human has brought his situation into some sort of sharp, brightly colored perspective. He turns off the radio and walks cautiously into the kitchen of the apartment, the colors and smells lurid and sort of garish, everything too bright and too noisy, too real and in his face. There's a fridge with food in it, a stove and an oven, a table with placemats beneath a thin, rectangular window that reminds Eddie of a submarine or something. Plants everywhere - he runs into three different types of ferns, just poking around the kitchen - and dirty dishes piled in the sink. Car keys in a dish shaped like an apple by a front door, which has a list of phone numbers taped to the back, sort of like a hotel - but it's handwritten, and DIY laminated with scotch tape. Eddie frowns at it, looking for some sort of clue, but - there's no explanation for any of the numbers, of course, because why would there be? You don't need to leave behind a convenient context for notes that you're writing to yourself. Eddie doesn't recognize any of the names anyway - least of all _Timothy Beaumont,_ who is apparently the guy whose life Eddie's just woken up in. Jesus fucking Christ.

There's a small living room area, with a stackable washer and dryer shoved into a closet next to a futon couch and a TV so small it gives Eddie a ghost of a tension headache just looking at it. Eddie flips it on regardless, though, at a loss for how to gather more information about where the fuck he is and what the fuck is happening without a cell phone. At least this guy has cable. 

He's in Los Angeles, he discovers, after finding a local news channel. And it's also October, which is pretty fucked up considering Eddie is _pretty sure_ it's supposed to be July, just lke he's _pretty sure_ his name isn't fucking _Timothy Beaumont_. Eddie dispassionately watches a news anchor read the headlines for twenty minutes, trying to think and not think at the same time, which goes just about as well as it ever does. The sight of his own ("his own") hairy feet, sticking out from beneath the cuffs of jeans he didn't buy, on a body that's not his, is making him nauseous. A commercial for a local home goods store pops up on the screen, and Eddie takes one look at the picture of a half-finished bathroom and remembers Henry Bowers, coming at him with a knife through a dirty shower curtain, and then he has to run back into the kitchen to puke his guts out into the sink. 

It's gotta be more clown shit. Right? Eddie spits out bile and pinches himself, trying to wake himself up. The hallucinations, the dreams - they all felt so real when he was in them, that's what made them so terrifying. And of course _some_ of it was very real, after all, real enough to kill people. To take little kids like Georgie and rip them into pieces, to break Eddie's arm all those years ago, to half-eat Stan's face. So this is no different, right? Just a bad nightmare. He needs to go back to sleep, is the thing. When he wakes up everything will be normal again. 

He doesn't _really_ believe it, even as he's dragging himself back into the strange bedroom and planting himself on the bed sheets face down, like he's grounding himself. But it's the best he's got right now, and so that will have to do. 

Eddie and Myra have only been married for four years, which in practice has felt like an eternity, even though people are always surprised by that when Eddie mentions it. _Oh, you seem like you've been together forever,_ says the receptionist at Myra's office. _You just seem so comfortable together_ \- Eddie's boss. _You two make such a natural couple_ \- their loud neighbor. 

Eddie had no real friends of his own to comment on the veracity of this, because he was a touchy and difficult person. (Is. If he still counts as himself, while he's currently residing inside of Timothy Beaumont, whoever the fuck _he_ is.) His relationships pre-Myra were all variations on a theme: whoever he could find that would a) be willing to put up with latex gloves in bed, b) didn't expect emotional honesty from him, and c) would piss off his mother. Needless to say, the middle of that Venn Diagram was pretty slim. 

His girlfriend in college was an art major who dumped him for her high school boyfriend, which felt like poetic justice at the time, some sort of confirmation of the thoughts in Eddie's head, which were self-loathing and defeatist at the best of times. He had a year-long fling (on again, off again, on again and then a tortuous, fuzzily-defined on again) with a bisexual mechanic from Bed Stuy - the closest Eddie's ever come to feeling actual sexual affection for a woman, if he's being honest - and after that ended he started having sex with men from the internet, which was a little more satisfying in one sense, albeit much more emotionally dangerous. 

When he was thirty-two, he met a man on Match.com (yeah, yeah, he knows how that sounds) that he actually took home to Jersey, which in retrospect had been a sort of vindictive idea, both towards his mother and the man in question, who was a mild-mannered gay stockbroker who spent the entirety of their relationship asking Eddie if he was okay wih things. _You good with it like this? You okay if I hold your hand? No big deal. You sure you want to do that tonight? Whatever you want, man._ Eddie retaliated against this stunningly offensive, infuriating concern by being a total dick to him, both in how blatantly he used the guy as a cudgel against his Ma, and also by cheating on him with a receptionist from his office, who was a twenty-eight year old graduate student that Eddie didn't even like that much. 

So like, whatever - it's not like he's got a ton of good relationship karma stored up. In some sense, Eddie's always felt like he deserved this somehow - to end up right back where he started, on a plastic-covered couch with a woman who saw him as more of a CPR safety mannequin than a person. Eddie's mother died in extreme pain - stomach cancer, which she'd refused actual medical treatment for, preferring her hacky Facebook science instead - and Myra had been her hospice nurse, which was how they met. At the time, it felt like something he had to submit himself to. Her coy way of flirting was to imitate his mother's behavior, albeit a little more subdued - asking about his health, suggesting things in ways that didn't really sound like suggestions, mother henning him in a way that Eddie's sure she thought was sweet. Or cute. Or something - either way, it's not like Eddie didn't know what he was getting into. 

It's strange to think about it now, it _was_ bone-shakingly strange to wake up in Derry and realize what he'd done to himself, what kind of feverish stupor he'd been living in, all those years. He and Bev had sat up late the first night and talked about it - the indomitable Beverly Marsh, so intimidating but so easy to talk to - chain smoking on the front steps of the motel and biting her thumbnail down to the cuticle. 

"It's like waking up," Bev had said, pale and thin and bruised, beneath the yellow streetlight in the parking lot. It had made Eddie's heart ache, looking at the thin, sallow skin of her neck, and the faint bruises in various stages of healing on her wrists. "Or maybe more like that scene in Inception - have you seen it? - where the girl realizes she's dreaming. When she looks around and notices how wrong everything is, and then panics."

"I don't get out to the movies that much," Eddie said absently, realizing only after the fact that he sounded like an old man. But wasn't that what he was? It was how he felt, a lot of the time. "But I know what you mean."

"Fuck." Bev looked at him with big, tearful eyes, and it occurred to Eddie that he'd seen her cry before, many times. The memories were still coming back like landmines, exploding in his face whenever he stumbled across something that reminded him - and sitting there in the parking lot with Bev, Eddie remembered for the first time that they used to hang out sometimes, just one on one together. Bev used to have a sense of where everybody was all the time, without being told. She'd surprise him somewhere in town - on the street, walking home, in the baseball field behind the school, the Barrens, wherever - and she'd slide up to him, her bony elbows sticking out of her overalls, and say, _hey Eds. Wanna go somewhere?_ And then she and Eddie would avoid their houses together for a few hours. They'd never talked about it, really, but she'd get upset sometimes when it would start to get late, and she'd have to go home. Eddie remembers that now. 

"Bev," Eddie had said, reaching out without any idea of what he was going to do with the gesture, but as usual Bev read his mind and took his hand in her free one, squeezing it so tightly her fingertips turned white. "It'll be okay. We remember it now, right?"

"Fuck, Eds. I've made such a fucked up mess of things," Bev said, her voice cracking. Eddie remembers so vividly how her hand was shaking as she smoked, the way her lips were chapped, almost bleeding around the cigarette. Sitting there with Bev is more clear in his memory than probably the entirety of the four years he'd spent with his wife combined - other than the morning that he'd left for Derry, when Myra was yelling at him from the kitchen, slamming dishes around while he packed his suitcases. That day, unfortunately, is nightmarishly clear. 

Bev's the first person he tries to call, for this reason. Talking to anyone else is a ludicrous notion - Myra is out of the question, she probably thinks he's dead if he's been gone for three months and to be honest, the idea of dealing with her right now makes him want to throw himself off of that dingy patio - and the other Losers, while viable options, would be...volatile conversations as well. To say the least. Eddie loved those idiots with every ounce of his heart, would've died for them in a second without question, but none of them are exactly _gentle people._ Other than Ben, maybe. _Maybe._

He gets his hands on a cell phone - Timothy Beaumont's cell phone, which was sitting on a wireless charger in the living room - that's thankfully keyed to biometrics, so getting into it is easy enough. There's a few text notifications and a bunch of emails that Eddie refuses to look at, opening up a browser window instead to try and figure out what Bev's phone number might be, only to find that the page is already loaded to a porn site, which is just, wow. Awesome. Eddie grimaces and swipes it away, and the other browser tabs that are open are, ah...similar, and Eddie immediately revises his initial opinion of Timothy Beaumont's freshly laundered sheets, and what they might indicate about his personality, as he vindictively taps the "Close All" button. 

Google is a treasure trove of information; the initial search for Bev's name brings up a flurry of articles about her divorce - "fuckin' A, Bevvie," Eddie says out loud, grinning to himself as he scrolls - which is apparently both acrimonious and very public, due to some of the headlines Eddie sees, his face getting darker and darker as he reads. A more specific search for Bev's company reveals that she's currently "taking time away from her career to focus on her mental health," and Rogan-Marsh Designs is, of course, frozen in a state of legal ambiguity while its two founders gear up for an ugly divorce. Eddie sighs in defeat; he should've seen that one coming. He doesn't even try to look at Facebook or anything - he'd seen those bruises in Derry. There's no fucking way Bev's going to have any of her phone numbers or email addresses accessible to the public. 

He thinks for a second, ruling out Bill and Richie just as quickly - Eddie's going to have a hard enough time already proving he's not a lunatic, he doesn't need to come off like a stalker fan on top of it - but Mike and Ben might be viable options. He Googles Ben and quickly discovers that he's wrapped up in Bev's legal shit - named in the divorce filings somehow, according to a gossip site that seems to be implying that Bev was leaving Tom for another man. Eddie doesn't know if he believes that exactly - he hadn't really noticed anything between them in Derry, but who knows what memories he's missing? Or what could've happened in the past three months? Hell, they all could be sleeping with each other now, and Eddie would have no way of knowing. Just one big orgy, night after night. Dealing with trauma via their dicks. 

That was a joke of Richie's, Eddie remembers suddenly, almost before the thought is even finished forming. Did he make it in...Derry three months ago? Or Derry thirty years ago? He tries to place the voice with a face - kid Rich or grown up Rich - but the memory is fuzzy, incoherent. Almost like he'd dreamed it.

Feverishly, Eddie starts Googling in earnest then, seized with the terrible thought that maybe Richie is dead, maybe Bill and Mike are dead too, and Eddie just doesn't know yet because he just woke up in someone else's fucking body three months after the fact. A search for Bill brings up similar gossip articles - Eddie grimaces in sympathy at some of those headlines - and Richie's name just brings up his Twitter, and videos of his stand up. _Derry maine, derry news, derry deaths_ all reveal a myriad of horrors that make Eddie rock back and forth on the couch with anxiety, a pit of nausea deep in his gut, but none of the names named are familiar, and the most recent news Eddie can find is of the death of the gay guy who'd gotten killed at the Canal Days Festival. So that's something, at least.

He _could_ Google himself, he figures. If he's been missing this whole time...Myra would've filed a missing persons report, there'd be _some_ sort of news article about it, probably. He's not sure what the Losers would've done, in that instance - all of that relies heavily on what the fuck happened in Derry that resulted in Eddie waking up here, what the hell IT had done to him - but Eddie's a white man with a wife and a high profile job, there's no way they wouldn't have put his face on _some_ newspaper front page somewhere. 

He thinks about it, and then almost pukes again, and decides, rather firmly: _nah._ He Googles Mike instead. 

Turns out he has a blog, with a pretty extensive history on it of all the weird shit that's ever happened in their hometown - under his _real name?_ What the _fuck,_ Mike? - and a very convenient contact form for "contributions, tips, and personal stories." Eddie figures that's better than nothing, and debates for a long time on what to send, before thinking _fuck it_ and shooting off a _Mikey, it's Eddie. Remember the time you puked in Richie's mom's underwear drawer and I lied to everyone and said it was me? I never told anyone else, and I don't think you did, either. Call me at this number_ and hoping for the best. 

It's been about a day, since Eddie woke up here, and he hasn't left the apartment. There was a lot of sleeping and freaking out, the first twelve hours or so, interrupted only by the occasional sad, guilty snacking from the fridge, but there isn't _that_ food in the kitchen, and Eddie is going to have to leave the apartment eventually. He feels unimaginably weird in someone else's body - he keeps running into things, and standing up too fast and almost falling - but he braved the shower this morning, and that wasn't too terrible. Sure, he didn't look at his dick - _The Dick,_ he thinks, his mental commentary helpfully supplying one of Richie's creepier Voices - but it's only been a day, he's working up to it. Fuck off. 

It's Friday, he figures out. If this guy has a job, then Eddie is definitely a no show for the day. He spends most of the morning pacing and waiting for Mike's phone call, but the only thing that happens to Timothy Beaumont's phone is more texts, from someone saved in the contact list as _Kelly - Office._ Eddie desperately, _fervently_ hopes that Kelly - Office is not a girlfriend (probably _not_ a wife, judging by both the porn on the phone and the sad, bachelor status of this apartment) and tentatively reads a few of the messages, which are - to his relief - all work related. Timothy has a new client to meet on Tuesday, and he's high profile, Kelly says. Eddie scrolls back through the log, trying to figure out what kind of "client" this is, and what kind of "job" Timothy "works," but the bulk of the conversation back and forth seems to be about lunch orders. 

Poking around in the guy's email seems to be a bit too far, inasmuch as privacy concerns go (not that washing the guy's dick isn't also an invasion of his personal space, but it's not like Eddie could've prevented _that_ ), but he does read the notifications as they come in, and most of it is just spam. One email drops in around noon from someone named Chris that has the subject line _Have you seen this?_ but Eddie doesn't open it. Another one comes in a few minutes later - a newsletter from what looks like some kind of academic journal. 

For lack of anything else to do, while he anxiously waits for Mike to both read his email and decide to call, Eddie starts poking around the apartment, looking for clues - there are piles of books everywhere, it seems, and a lot of magazines too - intellectual shit, like the New Yorker and Harpers. There's a box beneath the futon that Eddie discovers is filled to the brim with literary journals, and several folders of what look like articles clipped from medical journals, on anything from pediatrics to oncological studies. 

Is Timothy a doctor? Eddie thinks he might be. The shitty, cramped apartment says otherwise, but who knows, maybe the guy's got money problems. He flips through some of the articles, trying to find some common thread of interest, but it seems completely random to him - but Eddie's not a doctor, what the fuck does he know? Maybe there's a pattern he's not seeing. In the kitchen, there's a postcard pinned to the fridge with magnets - a picture of Chicago, the big bean statue - but the back of the card is blank. Eddie frowns at it, wondering, and slides it carefully back into place, beneath a cartoon bunny rubber magnet, so old the colors have faded into milky pastels. 

He feels not entirely awake, which is understandable, but on edge at the same time, which is horrible. Eddie puts the phone back on the charger half a dozen times, willing himself to stop staring at it, but none of the available distractions work all that well - he can't focus long enough to read any of the books or magazines, he can't force himself to take a nap considering he slept for almost twelve hours last night, and the TV makes him feel shaky and weird, the news all a few months out of date, the sitcom reruns so banal and _normal_ that they just make him feel worse. Eddie eats toast mainly, with peanut butter he finds in the cupboard - he's reasonably assured that the guy wouldn't keep anything he's allergic to in his own kitchen - and that alone is thrilling enough that he makes it his primary meal for the day. Eddie hasn't eaten real peanut butter in like, ten years. Jesus, he'd forgotten how much he fucking loved it. 

So that's what he's doing when the phone rings - eating peanut butter toast and trying not to obsess - an unknown number, which sends Eddie's pulse into overtime. He nearly slams his face against the counter, standing up from the kitchen table to grab the phone off the counter - Jesus, it's like getting vertigo every time he stands up. He's out of breath when he answers, which doesn't give the greatest impression. But whatever. 

"Hello?" The voice on the other end is obviously female, which means it's not Mike. Eddie's heart sinks. "Is this Mr. Beaumont?"

"Um, yes?" Eddie says, unsure of the ethics of answering the question truthfully. 

"Oh good," the lady says. "This is Mattie from Dr. Hester's office. I was just calling to confirm your check-up appointment for Monday morning - we have you on the books for ten o'clock. Does that still work for you?"

"Um," Eddie says again, at a loss. "Dr. Hester?"

"Yes," Mattie says. "We made the appointment for you six months ago at your last cleaning."

"Sorry," Eddie says, clearing his throat. The voice still sounds incredibly strange and alien, coming out of what feels like _his_ mouth. Timothy Beaumont has a much deeper voice, and his throat even _feels_ different when he talks. "Sorry, I'm not sure I remember which doctor is Hester - I have a few different physicians and I'm afraid I'm not very good with names…"

"Oh!" Mattie says, with a little laugh. "We're a dentist's office, sir. Looks like we saw you last April for a cleaning and...a cavity filling, looks like." There's a slight pause, like she's reading something. "We just have you down for a routine check up and cleaning on Monday morning - looks like Janna made it with you last time. Do you remember her? Texan accent, blue streak in her hair?"

"Oh, ah, yeah," Eddie lies, faking a laugh. "Yeah, sorry. I remember now."

"It's fine, I'm terrible with names too," Mattie says, laughing along with him in a friendly way. "Good thing I have a computer! So Monday's alright? If that doesn't work with you, I could probably fit you in later this week. We've had a few cancellations."

"No, uh, Monday's fine," Eddie says. He hasn't made any plans beyond the next twenty minutes, really, but the least he could do is not fuck with his guy's life overly, he figures. "Ten? I'll be there. I assume you have my email - if you could send me a confirmation with the address, I'd appreciate it."

"Of course," Mattie says. "Well thanks a lot, Mr. Beaumont - if you have any questions feel free to call us back. We're open limited hours on Saturdays, so if you call before two, someone will be here. And we look forward to seeing you on Monday!"

"Right," Eddie says blankly, trying to muster up something polite to say. "Sure. Monday."

"Have a nice afternoon!" Mattie chirps, a visitor from a more cheerful, normal world. Eddie hangs up feeling like an absolute gremlin. 

All in all, there's a growing sense of dread and resignation that culminates with another phone call that evening, as Eddie is sullenly spreading peanut butter on toast for the fifth time that day. The caller ID on the phone says _Kelly - Office,_ and Eddie contemplates letting it go to voicemail before he decides, yeah no, he kind of does need to know _some_ details about the life he's been unceremoniously dropped into. He answers it. 

"Tim, Jesus," says the voice, who is apparently a _man_ \- Eddie almost laughs in surprise, remembering suddenly that Kelly is actually a unisex name, "I've been texting you since last night. I know you took the weekend but did you lock your phone in a vault or something?"

"Well," Eddie says slowly, licking peanut butter off his thumb. He's hit again with a wave of dysphoria, since the thumb he currently has is a different shape than the one he's used to, and he has to close his eyes and lean against the counter for a second while the vertigo passes. "No. Sorry - I've just been kinda - busy. What's up?"

"You didn't read the texts either, did you? Never mind," Kelly says, but he sounds sort of amused, rather than irritated. If this were Eddie's life, and one of Eddie's coworkers making this call, they'd probably already be sniping at each other. "I did want to give you a heads up so you weren't blindsided when you get back on Tuesday. The new patient I scheduled is pretty high profile - it was all through his agent, really last minute. They seemed fairly urgent about it, so I went ahead and booked him an hour, I wanted to make sure that was okay with you."

"Sure, yes," Eddie says, with absolutely no idea whether this really would be okay with Timothy Beaumont. "High profile?"

"A comedian," Kelly says absently, and Eddie's stomach drops, somehow already knowing what he's about to say. "Richard Tozier? He's been in the news recently. The referral came through Steve Baldwin at RCA. He was a patient of yours back in the day, when you were with Feldman and Reese, right?"

"Right," Eddie stutters, his heart pounding viciously in his chest. Richie, it seems to be saying. _Richie, Richie, Richie._ "Right. I remember him. He's...an hour? On Tuesday morning?"

"Right," Kelly says, "just a consultation for the first appointment, obviously. So that's okay? I didn't want to misstep, but I didn't want to turn Steve down for a favor either. He's a good guy."

"Right," Eddie says faintly, his mind a million miles away. It can't be a coincidence. It just...can't. "Fuck," he blurts in the next second, forgetting momentarily that he's on a phone call. He _is_ a doctor, he realizes. And Richie is supposed to be _his patient._ "Uh, Kelly? What's his...issue? I mean - what am I...consulting with him about?" Eddie winces, as soon as he finishes speaking. That was...not smooth. 

"His...issue?" Kelly repeats, clearly at a loss. "I mean, that's - I think that's between you and him, isn't it? I'm just your receptionist, Tim, you don't normally tell me that stuff."

"Oh, yeah, of course," Eddie blusters, slamming his forehead against the side of the fridge two or three times. "That would be a confidentiality issue. Obviously. Because I'm a doctor, and he's my patient."

"That's right," Kelly says slowly, very audibly weirded out. Eddie slams his forehead against the fridge again. "So, uh - I'll email you the appointment details. Just so you have it. I'm driving to Ojai now for my sister's thing, but if you need anything over the weekend I'll have my phone on me. Is that cool?"

"Yeah, that's cool," Eddie says, feeling like an idiot.

"Great," Kelly says, obviously just as freaked out by this conversation as Eddie is. "Not that you will need anything, but you know, just in case. Hey - have a good weekend, man. You deserve the time off, yeah?"

"Yeah," Eddie says blankly, and then belatedly adds, "you too. Have fun in, uh, Ojai."

"Sure, thanks," Kelly says, clearly rethinking his career path entirely, and hangs up. Eddie immediately sinks down into the newest chair, panting like a fainting wife in a costume drama. 

It occurs to him that in his frantic Googling earlier, he hadn't thought to Google _Timothy Beaumont,_ which is so stupid Eddie _must_ have been emotionally compromised. A few taps the answer is at his fingertips: _Timothy Beaumont, MA LPC, Licensed Professional Counselor._ Eddie scrolls through the short listing that he finds on a psychiatry database, the first Google result that had come up, and discovers that Timothy works _primarily with people dealing with depression and grief, as well as those who struggle with substance abuse and dependence._ Well, fuck. 

That Richie apparently needs an emergency appointment with someone like that doesn't seem good; Eddie does another round of frantic Googling, a deep dive into Richie's search results that doesn't really bring up any illuminating information. His Twitter account has been mostly silent since July, aside from a picture of a sunset from a boat that was posted a few weeks ago, and a few self-deprecating jokes about the show he'd bombed before going to Derry - Eddie remembers him talking about that, fretting about it out loud while trying to make it seem funny like he used to do when he was a kid. There's no news articles or paparazzi shots or anything, at least not that Eddie can find - as far as he can tell, Richie just went home and just...laid low for the past three months. 

Clearly _something_ happened in Derry, though - you don't frantically book a consultation with a grief counselor for no reason. Bev and Ben are alive, Eddie knows that, and so is Bill. So the four of them made it out, at least. It could be about Stan, of course. Or Mike - he's not famous, it's not a guarantee that if something happened to him, it would be apparent in the search results. Eddie feels anxious, a myriad of possibilities running through his head, his stomach churning. Mike getting impaled, eaten. His arm ripped off like Georgie. Dragged down into the sewers by a rotting hand, screaming the whole time for help, zombies tearing through the walls of the library, their gaping mouths dripping with pus and blood and vomit - 

Something drops in Eddie's stomach, low and sick, the answer hitting him solidly in the solar plexus. He hadn't wondered, even for a second, what had happened to _his_ body. He hasn't Googled himself, either. He drops the phone on the table with a clatter and pushes away, his hands on his face. 

"Oh fuck," he blurts, and puts his head between his knees. There's a faint ringing in his ears, like the clear sound of the church bell that used to announce the service every Sunday on the same street as Eddie's first apartment building in the city - a big, old Catholic church in Brooklyn that had always seemed ominous and unwelcoming to Eddie, twenty-one and at odds with himself. Eddie breathes slow and deep, random bursts of memory flashing through his head in little bunches, like sparks off of metal, scraping against concrete. His Ma's apartment in Jersey, the rumbling engine of his first car, the smacking sounds of dodgeballs hitting the pavement in the playground outside his elementary school. The stray cat that used to live outside the house he lived in in his thirties, the cologne he wears to work that Myra hates, Chinese food, baths with lavender, fries with salt and vinegar, Richie's hand on his shoulder - thirteen years old or forty-one, does it even matter? Eddie lifts his head up and rests it on his palm, feeling dazed, like he stood up too fast, and realizes he's wheezing. 

Is he dead? He could be dead. Eddie squints his eyes shut and tries to wrap his head around it. He doesn't _feel_ dead, not that that means anything. If the afterlife really turns out to be some guy named Tim, that would be really fucked up. 

He needs some distance, maybe. Eddie sits up straight, with some difficulty, and glares at the phone. It stays dark - no call from Mike today. No way to get in touch with anyone else. He could call Myra, but he'd rather punch himself in the balls, thanks. Eddie presses the volume button to look at the time - seven thirty-three. _Close enough,_ he thinks, and leaves it on the table as he goes to bed. It's been a day. 

Eddie can't remember his Facebook password, but that seems like a stupid idea anyway. Not that that stops him from trying; he spends most of Saturday rattling around the apartment, trying out different combinations of his go-to passwords and cursing himself for being so paranoid about identity theft that he'd locked down every social media account and email he had with nonsense alphanumeric passwords and fake answers to all the security questions. This hadn't been an issue when Eddie had access to the piece of paper inside his wallet with all the passwords on it, but now he's thinking he overdid it just a _little_. 

After locking himself out of almost everything, Eddie gives up. What was he gonna do anyway - message the Losers from his Facebook account? As if that wouldn't just freak them out more, if he really is dead. He still hasn't Googled himself - somehow he's both afraid of finding a flurry of news articles with bad news, but _even more_ afraid that he'll find nothing - but he does type Myra's name into the search bar late in the afternoon, bravely and stubbornly. 

Her LinkedIn page is the first result - unsurprising - and then her Facebook, which she keeps completely open to the public - something Eddie had always hated, and had tried to nag her about, to little success. Her father had left her and her mother when Myra was a toddler, an event that had so shaped the psychology of both women that Eddie sometimes thought they relished it, in some sad way, rolling around in the betrayal and anger until it became something familiar and pleasurable. It was certainly the most common topic of conversation when Eddie's mother-in-law came to visit - long afternoons at the kitchen table, _your father_ this, _your father_ that. This was, ostensibly, the reason Myra kept her socials all very public - because she wanted him to find her if he wanted. Eddie didn't understand, she said, because most of his family was dead. There was something very painful about having a piece of yourself out in the world, disconnected from you, lost. How could he ask her to cut herself off from the possibility? To shut down the only opportunity her father might have of finding her again?

"Sweetheart," Eddie had said, helplessly confused, "I thought you hated him. Why would you _want_ to talk to him?"

"Catharsis," Myra replied. "You don't understand. You've never been left like I was. No offense, honey."

Right. No offense. Eddie angrily scrolls through her Facebook wall, reading the cryptic posts with growing anger. Myra wasn't an emotionally healthy person, and Eddie knew that when he married her, but it had felt like the type of dysfunction that would suit Eddie's own, and besides - they were both lonely. They were kind to each other, Eddie had thought, not completely aware at the time how deeply fucked his understanding of kindness was. They loved each other in a manic sort of way, in the way that you latch onto a life preserver, with the desperation of two people in their late thirties who both thought they were unlovable and disgusting and laughably unsexy. 

With the amount of middle-grade, het bro film and television that Eddie consumed in those four years (not coincidentally the reason Eddie had been familiar with Richie's career, yuk yuk yuk), he had eventually convinced himself that a constant, low level feeling of resentment and hatred for one's spouse was normal and totally not a big deal at all. With Derry came a sort of embarrassing clarity - both on his resentfully, half-closeted homosexual sex life pre-Myra, and the gritted teeth, missionary position evenings that came afterward - which strikes Eddie as both deeply sad and intensely unfair to them both. He can't blame the amnesia for all of it, of course. He knew enough in his twenties to move out of his mother's house, to go looking for men to have sex with, to sit up at night and wonder about the aching loneliness in his chest, why nobody ever fit quite right, why he always felt like he was waiting for something to happen. So the question becomes: why did he marry her in the first place? A lot of sad answers there. Sad, pathetic, small, cowardly, et cetera, et cetera. 

Maybe the afterlife is a dingy apartment, with a smartphone but no way to reach out to the world you once knew. Maybe this is purgatory - a one bedroom in Los Angeles, only blocks away from the best friend you've ever had, who is in deep, profound pain but fuck if you can do anything about it. Maybe Eddie's meant to just knock his head against the walls here for the next eternity, obsessing over his mistakes until God - or whoever the fuck it is - deems him worth enough to let him succumb to oblivion. It would definitely seem to align philosophically with a universe that created IT.

Or maybe purgatory is Myra's Facebook page. Eddie comes across a link she'd shared two days after he'd left for Derry, an article from Psychology Today entitled, _Are You in Love with an Emotional Vampire? How to Cope with a Draining Mate._ Thirty-three comments, fifty-eight reactions. Eddie very nearly throws his phone across the room. 

From the general tone of her passive aggressive status updates, Eddie gathers that she's under the impression that he's left her - not what he'd specifically intended when he'd left the way he had, but he can't argue that he's unhappy with the result - which then gives him the chutzpah needed to finally search his name, which of course turns up nothing. His own LinkedIn, an article in Forbes about his firm that he's quoted in, the listing for the vintage Chevy he's been trying to sell for a couple years now (Myra had such violent distaste for Eddie's gearhead hobbies, and he had, at one point, attempted to appease her). No news articles, no obituaries. A quick comb through his firm's website confirms that he's probably been fired - his name's been taken off the directory. But no obvious clue as to how Eddie got sucked from his own body in Derry, Maine and spat into a grief counselor in Los Angeles, California. 

Still no email from Mike. In a burst of anger late in the evening, Eddie sends another message: _Mikey, who did you tell when you accidentally spilled Cherry Pepsi on your grandma's antique wedding throw? Who helped you get the stain out and swore on his dad's grave never to tell anyone else? ME. IT WAS ME. EDDIE. Fucking call me, asshole,_ which he immediately feels guilty about, but whatever. Eddie sits up until three AM watching infomercials and reruns of The Big Bang Theory, refreshing the page of Google results for his own name and despairing. He's not sure what the fuck else there is to do. 

There are email accounts already signed into on the phone, which Eddie finally breaks and looks at, thinking feverishly about Richie, about seeing Richie, about having to walk out into the world wearing this body and then talking to Richie with it. There's a lot of back and forth email threads between Timothy Beaumont and Kelly, most of which seem to be conversations picked up halfway through from something they'd obviously been discussing in person. Eddie doesn't bother to try and decipher those. 

There's a message from the dental office about his cleaning appointment, which Eddie doesn't find until late Monday afternoon when he's already missed it - well, whatever - and several from a lawyer updating him on the status of a malpractice case, which gives Eddie a minor heart attack until he reads further and discovers that Timothy Beaumont was _testifying_ for it, not being sued himself. Sort of a relief, he figures. 

And an email about Richie, forwarded from Kelly's address. It looks like a questionnaire of some kind, possibly not even filled out by Richie himself since the originating address is someone named _Kenya Hobbs, RCA Talent Management._ The questions remind Eddie of the pain worksheets they gave his mother, near the end - _rate your pain level on a scale of 1 - 10._ Worse were the ones with smiley faces - as if you could quantify how much your rotting body was bothering you each day with emojis? Eddie always filled them out on her behalf, and by the end he was just choosing the highest option for lack of more accurate information. 

_How much trouble are you having accepting the death of _________ ? How much does your grief interfere with your life? How often are you having images or thoughts of _________ when s/he died or other thoughts about death that really bother you?_ and so on like that. All the responses are on the high end of the scale, which isn't exactly encouraging.

The message attached, from Kenya Hobbs, reads: _He says he's been talking about it to a few friends from high school but we're concerned about their influence on him. He's never mentioned them before, he's been giving one of them money (!!), refuses to tell us details, etc. He had better friends in NYC I think, but I don't know if he still talks to them? Not much of a support network in LA other than Steve and I. He seems open to therapy in the abstract but when we've set up actual appointments for him he bails. We can't force him obviously but he's agreed to the consultation at least - better than nothing?? Really hope you can help. We're both very worried. Aware you can't tell us any details from here but anything we can do to help the process, don't hesitate to reach out._

Well, that doesn't make Eddie feel great. 

Wentworth Tozier died of a heart attack when Richie and Eddie were sixteen; it was sudden, and Eddie didn't actually remember it happening until they'd already been in Derry for a day and a half, and naturally there were other things on his mind at the time. But Eddie remembers it with stunning clarity now - it happened in the summer, while Eddie was grounded for something he doesn't even remember now, so Eddie didn't find out until he saw the obituary in the newspaper one morning, the last name catching his eye as he peeked over his Ma's shoulder. Eddie wasn't allowed to talk to his friends when he was grounded - which was nearly all the time, the further he progressed into adulthood - so it took him a few days to sneak away to a pay phone to call, and when he finally reached Richie it was the morning of the funeral. 

"Oh hey Eds!" Richie greeted, loud and boisterous, like nothing had happened. Eddie, stricken with worry and anxiety over what to say and how to say it, had been violently taken aback by the cheerfulness in his voice. "Say, it's been ages since I've heard from you! What's going on, Spaghetti, how's lockdown?"

"I - it's fine," Eddie stammered. "Richie, I saw in the paper about your dad, I wanted to - " A loud crash on Richie's side of the line interrupted his sentence. "What the fuck was that?"

"Fucking morons," Richie said, laughing. "My cousins are all here. Sorry, they're being loud as fuck, I didn't hear you. What'd you say?"

"I heard about your dad," Eddie said, pitching his voice a little louder. "Richie, I'm so sorry."

"Ah," Richie said, still sounding distracted, and like he was laughing a little, under his breath. "Yeah. Yeah, the funeral's today."

"I know. I wish I could come," Eddie said, having felt sick to his stomach for days at the thought of not being able to be there with Richie at the service, being locked away by his mother while his best friend had to do that alone. It was only Mike, Richie, and Eddie left in Derry by that point - and Mike was already working on the farm full-time by then. And they all knew, in the way that you know without knowing, that the others who'd left had already forgotten. "Are you okay? I mean - I wish I could be there."

"I'm fine," Richie said breezily. "Eds, listen, don't sweat it okay? It's gonna suck today, my ma's family is all here and everyone's cooking and yelling and crying, it's like the world's worst hen party or something. Plus you'd hate my cousins, they're all like little kids with dirty faces and none of them wash their hands before they eat - "

Eddie made an involuntary noise of disgust, something bone-deep and instinctual, that made Richie laugh in delight. "That's - I mean, I could still come, asshole, maybe I could just do it and go and then deal with my mom later - "

"Eddie no, are you serious? She'd lock you in the basement again and then I really won't get to see you until school starts," Richie said, referencing something that had, sadly, happened once or twice when Eddie had gotten a little too brave. "Seriously, it's fine. It'll be boring anyway. Just a lot of speeches from my dad's work friends, and my aunts and all their gross husbands."

"Yeah, but," Eddie said, feeling a weird mixture of sadness and what felt like _anger,_ almost, at Richie's dismissiveness. As an adult, looking back, of course Eddie realizes what was going on with Richie, the way the grief doesn't always hit you until later, how distractions like family and funeral arrangements and well-wishing visitors can make you feel like it's not real, can make you fool yourself into thinking that the person you love is just working late, out of town, about to pop up when all the fuss is over with a shrug and a, "surprise!" But at the time, Eddie had felt put out, almost offended, that Richie wasn't acting _sad._ That Eddie had been tying himself in knots for three days, worrying about him, and then there he was, yukking it up and making jokes about Eddie's anxieties, as usual. It felt surreal, wrong somehow. To have something so monumental happen and then listen to Richie act like nothing at all had changed. 

"Listen, thanks for calling," Richie said, his voice lowering a little, like he didn't want people to overhear. "Just keep your head down, okay Eds? Play nice, eat your vegetables. Come find me when you get out of jail."

"Are you sure you're okay, Richie?" Eddie asked. He remembers now what he'd really wanted to say, the words he'd had to choke down: _say the word and I'll be there. If you need me I would do anything not to let you down._

"Peachy keen, lima bean," Richie chirped. A peal of laughter on his end of the line interrupted the last word, and Eddie scowled at the inside of the phone booth, feeling restless and disturbed and angry at Richie, and then guilty for feeling so. "Gotta go, Eds. Thanks again."

"You're welcome," Eddie said shortly, and hung up petulantly before Richie could say anything else. It had felt vindictive, but not nearly as bad as Eddie himself felt, wanting to be needed by someone who obviously wasn't missing him at all. 

Eddie doesn't remember much of the rest of that summer - he'd spent most of it locked in his own house, alternatively screaming at his mother and then meekly acquiescing to whatever she wanted in half hearted attempts to get her to loosen up so he could go see Richie. But when school came around again, Richie missed most of the entire first month anyway, and whenever Eddie asked the teachers about him all they would say is that Richie was "excused from school for family reasons." Then when he _was_ there he seemed listless, quiet - not like himself, certainly, for obvious reasons. Eddie, alone on top of the hill without the chutzpah of the others to reach out, hadn't known how to help him - not that Richie wanted any help. Whenever Eddie would try to breach the subject openly Richie would change the subject as loudly and obnoxiously as possible, with a faint tinge of desperation that Eddie couldn't help but respond to, so eventually he gave up. 

With the clarity of foresight, Eddie can see the places where they weren't able to reach out to each other the way they both probably wanted to - the little misunderstandings and jagged edges of their personalities that came between them. None of it was insurmountable, and if they'd remembered each other after they'd left - well. Eddie doesn't want to think about what could've been different. It's a high cliff in his mind that would fuck him up completely, if he let himself fall over the edge. 

It's the cruelest irony that Eddie finds himself here, now, in the role of a _grief therapist,_ of all things - as if there were any occupation in the universe he were _less_ suited to. Eddie's given up on pinching himself to wake up, because it's not working. What was it that Stan used to say every morning, when they'd walk to school together on a day they knew was about to be terrible?

"Only way out is through," is what it was. Delivered grimly, with his face set and serious and his elbows cocked out at his sides, like a WWII soldier about to wade through the shore to Omaha Beach. Stanley, with his old man aphorisms and dry little jokes. When he moved away, in the fall of tenth grade - that had been the beginning of the end. Without his sturdy counterweight, the rest of them started spinning out into all directions, untethered from each other and flung chaotically out into the world without any clue about where they would land. 

Eddie reads the email again and swallows thickly, wondering if it would help to start Googling some basic information about therapists or just fucking wing it. Either way, there's no way he's going to pull this off, so it feels a little futile to expend the effort. Still - what choice does he have? To see Richie again - to have the chance to talk to him in person, to be united with someone in this nightmare situation - of course Eddie's not going to give that up. He's always been selfish like that. 

Whatever preconceptions Eddie might have had about what a grief therapist's office might look like are quickly demystified by the reality of Timothy Beaumont's hip little practice in Venice Beach. It looks more like an apartment than an office, squeezed in-between a Greek deli and a vacant gas station with a CLOSED PERMANENTLY sign on the door - Eddie had driven past it three times in Timothy's sputtering Honda Accord. The parking lot is almost non-existent - only three spaces, two of which are taken when Eddie finally finds it, which feels intentional - and the front door is partly blocked by a worn surfboard leaning up against the patio wall that Eddie carefully shoves aside to open the screen door. If there was such a thing as a spiritual opposite workplace, then this place would probably be Eddie's - used furniture in the lobby, pop music playing from a radio, and Kelly the receptionist, who has a farmer's tan and sleeve tattoos on both arms. 

"I set up the office already," Kelly tells him, thankfully ignoring Eddie's wide-eyed incredulity with a professional sort of politeness that speaks to the nature of his relationship with Timothy Beaumont. Not friends, then, not really. Eddie is deeply grateful. "Hopefully he won't cancel. Hey, how was your weekend?"

"Fine," Eddie says, feeling weirder than usual in his borrowed body, being looked at for the first time by other people. He's weirdly aware of the clothes he's wearing, which were the most workday-looking ones Eddie could find in the closet - a pair of worn chinos and a loosely-fitting button up shirt. Still miles away from what Eddie is used to wearing to work every day, that's for sure. He feels like he might as well be naked. "Did he confirm the appointment?"

"I mean," Kelly says, blandly neutral, "one of his agents did. Kenya's the one I've been talking to." Kelly's desk is neat, which Eddie is impressed by, but he doesn't seem to have a computer - there's a tablet mounted on some sort of stand that he keeps glancing at, and two different cell phones are lying on the desk, which is weird. That's weird, right? "I think he'll show. He called to give me his insurance this morning, which is encouraging. Right?"

"Right," Eddie says definitively, as if he has any idea what the fuck he's talking about. 

"Well, let's hope," Kelly says absently, tapping away at the tablet screen. "I'm gonna try and work on December - Mac wants to reschedule all his appointments again. But let me know if there's something else you want me to work on - it won't take me all day, so. Your only other appointment today is the lawyer for the Ramirez thing, she's coming by at four to talk about the deposition next week."

"Uh, sure, that's fine," Eddie says blankly, inching past the desk and aiming himself towards the inner office, which is shut off from the lobby by a heavy, wooden door that looks much newer than anything else in this building thus far. "I'll just be - " he gestures vaguely. His strategy not to arouse suspicion so far is "don't talk much," and judging by Kelly's complete non-interest, it seems to be working. 

"Of course. I'll show him in when he gets here," Kelly says, and Eddie gulps and mumbles something he hopes sounds polite, and escapes. 

It's surreal to say the least. The inner office - where the actual therapy happens, presumably - has a desk that actually looks like a desk, with a laptop and a phone with an actual cord, to Eddie's relief. Something familiar, at least. There's a couple of armchairs beneath a window with a heavy shade, and a few contraptions by the door that look sort of like miniature humidifiers - white noise machines, Eddie figures, from the few therapy appointments he's participated in (with various degrees of willingness) in his life. Eddie putzes around, sitting at the desk, getting comfortable, feeling himself fall into familiar motions - opening the computer, adjusting the seat, all the things he would do if given a new office at his real job, in his real life. It's hard not to feel like he's dreaming, still - like this isn't some sort of play he's in, a game. Maybe that's what it is. Fuck if Eddie knows. 

Richie's appointment is scheduled for ten, Eddie has been informed both by Kelly's emails over the weekend and the calendar app on the phone, but it's already nine-thirty and Eddie's so antsy he can't sit still for very long. He pokes around the office for as long as he can - it's pretty bare, especially compared to the messy, lived-in clutter of the lobby, which is clearly where Timothy and Kelly spend most of their actual work time, Eddie's guessing - and nine forty-five comes and goes without a Richie appearance. Then it's ten, and Kelly pokes his head in to shrug expansively and say, "well, he's got the hour. Let's wait and see." Then it's ten-fifteen. Ten-thirty. Eddie stops pacing. 

He feels at once relieved _and_ disappointed, and then newly anxious again when he thinks about this rest of the work day, a long span of hours that Eddie has to fill somehow, not to mention a meeting with a lawyer that Eddie definitely won't be able to fake his way through. He wasn't sure what he'd expected - that he would tell Richie the second he entered the room, just say "it's me, it's Eddie," and Richie would instantly believe him and whisk him away? 

Well, probably. Okay, that's exactly what Eddie had been picturing. 

Eddie fucks around on the laptop for as long as he can, and at ten-fifty or so he finally sighs in distressed frustration, and goes out to the lobby again. Kelly has his chin propped on one hand, and a calendar open on his tablet, with intimidating colored blocks of appointments filling up the month of December like a bad game of Tetris. 

"Any word?" Eddie says, trying to sound casual. He leans against the jamb of the door, thinking, _this looks Californian, right? Californian professionals do this?_ and then promptly loses his balance and has to catch himself against the wall to keep from falling. He's still not fucking used to how weird this guy's body is, goddamn it. Luckily Kelly doesn't see. 

"Nope," Kelly says. "You want me to call them? We could try to set up a new appointment."

"Sure. Yes," Eddie says. "Let's, uh, let's give him as many opportunities as we can."

Kelly nods wordlessly, picking up one of his cell phones. Eddie retreats quickly back into the inner office, relieved beyond all words that he'd gotten through that without sounding like a weirdo. 

Feeling skittish and ridiculous, Eddie resolves to wait out most of the day in the private office - or at least as much of it as he can. It feels childish, like that one year in college when Eddie's roommate was always having sex with his girlfriend in the shared living room, so he and their third suitemate always had to lock themselves in the bedrooms and pretend it wasn't happening. But still - not much choice. 

Eddie opens up Timothy's email, desperately trying to stay busy, and just starts poking around, with the mind that if Kelly walks in he can at least look like he's doing legitimate work - which, thank _God_ there aren't any other actual therapy appointments today, Eddie would fucking lose it - and after about twenty minutes of that Eddie reaches a sort of emotional plateau in his head that feels very similar to how he felt in the lobby of the Townhouse, standing there in his fucking sport jacket listening to Beverly tell them all how they were going to die. 

"Stupid," Eddie mutters, clicking mutinously on the search bar. He's thinking about Richie at sixteen, too tall for the Juniors department already, all arms and legs and hair, hunched over in the very last seat in the back of the class with his eyes on the ground. Richie acting like he'd never had a dad in the first place, avoiding even the topic of fatherhood altogether, so he wouldn't have to talk about his. Richie sitting next to Eddie at the playground of the elementary school, so quiet it freaked Eddie out, pushing rocks back and forth with his shoe while Eddie rambled about whatever he could come up with, just to fill the silence. Fuck that. 

_Dear Mr. Tozier,_ Eddie writes, feeling a wellspring of adrenaline in his chest. A nervy grin spreads across his face as he starts picturing Richie's reaction, before he's even written all the words in his head. _We were sorry to have missed you this morning at your scheduled appointment, which you missed, I presume because you were trapped beneath a large rock of some kind, or possibly dying on the side of the road in a horrible car accident. If that's the case, my condolences to your loved ones. Don't worry about the bill, we've already invoiced your surviving family members for the co-pay._

_Do you like chicken, Mr. Tozier? I don't. It's one of the easiest meats to undercook, you know. I think it's the mark of a weak-minded individual, to be someone who eats chicken all the time. Have you ever heard the saying "you are what you eat?" Do you eat a lot of chicken, Richie Tozier? Just wondering. No reason at all I brought that up, but anyway, if you want to reschedule you should fucking nut up and call my office. Thanks. I'm available today until three._

Eddie doesn't sign it. He sends it off, to the email linked in the appointment confirmation that he really and truly hopes belongs to Richie and not one of the agents who'd set this up for him - _tozrllc@gmail.com,_ which sort of sounds like an email Richie would have. He hopes. He doesn't have to wait long for a reply. 

_im sorry whom the fuck is this,_ Richie has written back, and of course he's the sort of person who doesn't use capital letters, Eddie doesn't know why he's even surprised. _did kenya tell you to send me that or is that like, new age therapy? nvm, dont care. sorry i missed the appt, i have cholera. uncurable._ The message is unsigned, capped only by _Sent from my iPhone._

Eddie grins, and sends him back an exact copy of his message in a Google Doc, with his typos corrected and annotated. The silence that follows, for the following forty minutes, has a distinct air of incredulous offense, and Eddie eats a sandwich wrap Kelly brings him - chicken caesar salad, go figure - triumphantly at his desk, waiting for Richie's rebound. 

When it comes, it comes in the form of a link to a news article about Timothy Beaumont's arrest in 2009 for drunk and disorderly conduct outside of a bar in West Hollywood. _Prominent local psychiatrist booked on charges_ feels like a very vindictive headline, not to mention inaccurate. Eddie's a little offended on Timothy's behalf. 

_this u?_ is Richie's only attached message. Eddie laughs despite himself. 

_I'm a licensed counselor, not a psychiatrist,_ Eddie sends back, feeling a little bit more at home in the back and forth rhythm of talking to Richie, trading shit with Richie, lobbing spitballs at Richie. It's more familiar to Eddie than breathing - the bone-deep instinct to poke back. _That means I can't prescribe you the medication you clearly have a great need for. Too bad. But it also means that I can do this all day, asshole, because obviously I've got nothing better to do. Still having chicken for dinner tonight?_

This is, very probably, a completely and totally inappropriate interaction for a therapist to be having with a client, Eddie thinks. Good thing it's not his problem.

 _seriously who the fuck are you,_ Richie sends back, not even five minutes later. _kenya said you were good but full offense, are you allowed to talk to me like this? what if i don't fucking want to come and talk to you, are you just gonna cyberbully me until my agency stops paying you??_

Maybe, Eddie thinks. Actually - yes. That's exactly what he's going to do, for lack of a better plan. 

_How do you know you don't want to talk to me if you've never talked to me?_ Eddie writes, smiling to himself and thinking about the tongue twisters that Bill used to practice under his breath all the time, to train himself out of the stutter. _Maybe I'm the best person you've never met. Maybe I'm the love of your life. How do you know?_

A longer silence, that time. Richie's reply, when it comes, sounds legitimately angry. _youre super duper not!! i know that much dickwad. what the fuck are you doing? is this like fun for you is this how you keep from dying of boredom every day at work? fuck off_

 _You keep emailing me back,_ Eddie points out, and then punctuates that message with a long string of question marks. No reply comes to that one for almost twenty minutes, at which point Eddie opens up another reply window, sensing the frayed end of Richie's patience. _We can talk on the phone if you'd like, if you'd be more comfortable that way. But Kenya and Steve sound like they're genuinely worried about you, and my impression was that they do actually give a shit about you, you know, as a person. Why don't you just try? Just once. If you really hate me that much you can report me to the APA Ethics board. I'll give you the phone number and everything._

That is a lie. Eddie has no idea if the APA has an ethics board, much less whether or not a grief counselor would be subject to the APA's authority at all, but whatever. He's pretty confident that Richie of all people wouldn't know the specifics of the situation either, so. 

He sits there for a long time, waiting for Richie to send another email, but nothing comes. Eddie's starting to rethink this whole strategy, worrying himself into a snit, when Kelly knocks on the door and pops his head in again, a rueful smile on his face. 

"So, go figure, but Richie Tozier just called," he says. "He was kind of rude, but he rescheduled his appointment. He was really insistent about getting in before the end of the week, so I squeezed him in on Thursday. Is that good for you?"

"Thursday?" Eddie says, startled. Today is Tuesday. The thought of an entire work day in-between now and Richie is fucking unbearable. "Is there any way we can get him in tomorrow? Or, hell, this afternoon? We can reschedule with the lawyer."

"I - really?" Kelly says, looking visibly taken aback. His forearms flex against the doorframe, the bright colors of his tattoos too eye-catching for Eddie to tear his eyes away. He's the sort of guy that Eddie used to pick up at bars, back when Eddie was still picking up guys at bars. Straight-looking, beefy, athletic, younger. The kind of guy who'd want to fuck somewhere discreet and then not call Eddie afterward. Not even close to Eddie's actual type, either, which also helped. "You've got back-to-back appointments tomorrow morning, and then you always leave at three on Wednesdays to surf, so I figured - "

"Cancel them," Eddie says abruptly, something itchy and nervous in his chest. "I just talked to Mr. Tozier on the phone. I think he's in a...crisis state." Eddie pauses, gauging Kelly's reaction to that particular line of bullshit, but all he does is raise his eyebrows again slightly. "He's very vulnerable, and I think he really does need to take priority over our other clients. I mean - what are the appointments tomorrow anyway?"

"Uh," Kelly says, and yeah, he definitely thinks Eddie's on drugs or something. "Diane is at nine, but she won't mind getting rescheduled. Your eleven o'clock is with Nathan Fielder though, he's going to throw a shit fit."

"Just figure it out," Eddie says, slipping into the brusque, impatient tone he uses with the people at his office, who usually don't respond to or even acknowledge anything that might be construed as friendly. "Richie Tozier is the priority. I can make the calls myself if you don't feel comfortable."

Kelly's face does something strange, and then he shakes his head. "No prob, boss, you're the expert. I can do it," he says, pausing visibly and studying Eddie's face. "I made a new client folder on the drive for him," he says after a weird second. "Maybe you want to add your notes from your phone call?"

Eddie blinks, looking at the laptop briefly. His last email to Richie is still on the screen, revealingly bitchy. "Good idea. Hadn't gotten to it yet."

Kelly shrugs, his expression neutral again. "Just thought I'd mention it," he says, and slips back out of the office again. Eddie's shoulders relax the second he's gone. 

Eddie stares at the email box for awhile, waiting to see if Richie is going to send something else, but nothing appears. His calendar app pings though, and Eddie opens it, watching in real time as the colored blocks shift as Kelly changes them. Tomorrow morning, from nine to noon, a transparent box labeled "Richie Tozier, 9 - ??" appears. Eddie hits the approve button on his end and watches it solidify into solid blue with satisfaction. 

Hopefully he'll show up, this time. Eddie is prepared to unleash the full force of his vocabulary on his inbox if he doesn't. 

It's a goddamned miracle that Eddie makes it through the rest of the day - especially the appointment with the lawyer, which was intended to be a meeting to prepare Eddie to testify in the malpractice case, and in reality ends up being an awkward ten minutes of small talk before Eddie fakes a migraine and flees the situation without even a word to Kelly. Retreating with his tail between his legs to the small apartment - Eddie had found some car and house keys hanging on a chain by the door, very helpful - he replies to a concerned email from Kelly with something that sounds reasonably pathetic enough to excuse skipping out on the meeting, but not so close to death that he would find it weird when Eddie shows up bright and early for Richie's appointment the next morning. 

He's not sure he pulls that shit off. But whatever, Eddie's not gonna pull any of this off. By the time he collapses into bed that night, he's circled back around to not caring again. 

Still no email from Mike, Eddie notes. The guy's a librarian - why the fuck doesn't he check his email? Eddie sends another one, while he's standing by the Keurig in Timothy's kitchen, waiting for his cup of Green Mountain Caramel Vanilla Cream - the only fucking flavor the guy has in his house, apparently - _HEY MIKE. REMEMBER THE TIME YOU TOLD ME YOU HAD A SEX DREAM ABOUT RICHIE'S MOM? FUCKING CALL ME. IT'S FUCKING EDDIE._ He's gotta take the bait eventually, right? Eddie's running out of embarrassing secrets. 

On his way out the door, the phone rings, and Eddie picks it up without thinking about it - only just barely stopping himself from saying his normal phone greeting of _Edward Kaspbrak speaking,_ thank God. "Mr. Beaumont?"

"Yes?" Eddie places the voice, in the next second. The fucking dentist's appointment. "Oh - my teeth cleaning."

"Yes, this is Dr. Hester's office." It's the same receptionist from before - what was her name? Maggie? "Just calling to follow up! Unfortunately we did have to charge you a fee for missing your appointment, but I wanted to see if you'd like to reschedule. Like I said last time, we've had quite a few cancellations this week."

"Yes, I'm sorry I didn't call, something came up," Eddie says impatiently. "I don't think I want to reschedule right now, but - I'll give you a call when my schedule opens back up again, if that's alright - "

"Does Friday work for you?" she interrupts. Eddie is momentarily speechless in surprise. "Eleven-fifteen? I also have a two o'clock, a two-forty-five, and a three-thirty."

"I - don't want to reschedule right now," Eddie repeats himself, a little taken aback by the pushiness. "As I said, I will give your office a call when my schedule allows it."

"I'll put you down for two, and then if you want to change it just give us a call back. Does that work?" Her voice is determinedly cheerful, and Eddie blinks at the white plaster in the apartment building's hallway, unsure of how to respond to someone who seems to be vindictively scheduling him a teeth cleaning. Anger? Amusement? "Remember that if you don't cancel within 72 hours, you will be subject to the forty dollar cancellation fee - but don't worry, we have your card on file!"

"It's fucking Wednesday," Eddie sputters, indignant for the first time at the mention of money. "That's _forty-eight_ hours away, how do you expect people to - "

"Okay, and that's all set for you, Mr. Beaumont. I sent a confirmation to your email as usual. Is there anything else I can do for you?"

"You can put me on the line with your fucking manager," Eddie snaps. 

"Okay, great! We look forward to seeing you Friday afternoon!" she chirps, and before Eddie can muster up anymore angry bluster, the line goes dead. Eddie pulls the phone away from his face to stare at it incredulously. 

"What the fuck? What the fuck," he says, out loud, only to jump when he sees an older woman poking her head out of another apartment door, eyeing him suspiciously as she leans down to retrieve a certified letter from her doormat. "Hi. Morning."

Muttering something in what sounds like Russian, she gives him the stink eye and retreats quickly back inside her apartment. Sighing, Eddie turns away. Whatever, he thinks. That's his new strategy for this surreal, Twilight Zone nightmare. _Fucking whatever._

Richie looks like shit, because of course he does. His hair is long, brushing the collar of his wrinkled shirt, which has a mustard stain on the collar and a faded logo of a Chinese restaurant. He's wearing swim shorts with his knobby, hairy knees poking out, his feet shoved into a pair of broken sandals that make loud slapping noises as he walks, and his face is pale and haggard, like he hasn't been sleeping. He smells like booze and he doesn't say anything for the first fifteen minutes, stubbornly ignoring Kelly's polite greetings and Eddie's first feeble attempts at conversation. There are no visible injuries, no scars, no obvious clues as to what has happened, in the two and a half months since Derry. Nothing other than the look on his face, which is startlingly blank, neutral to the point of being off-putting. 

Eddie feels adrift, wavering between incredulity and tearful gratefulness, staring at the side of his unshaven, messy face. _Fuck_ he's tall. Was he that tall in Derry and Eddie was too distracted by his returning memories to notice?

"So," Eddie finally says, spinning back and forth in the desk chair and watching Richie poking through the generic bookshelves in the inner office. Neither of them have spoken in ten minutes. "Come here often?"

Richie's hand pauses on a leather bound book, one of those nonsense books that interior designers always put in offices that turn out to be weird tax manuals from the sixties, or old novels that nobody's heard of. "I'm seeing someone, so thanks but no thanks," he finally says, turning around with the book still in his hand. Eddie tries to catch his eye, but he keeps his face turned downward, shifting his weight back and forth in front of the bookcase, leafing quickly through the pages. "You're not my type, anyway. No offense."

"You're seeing someone?" Eddie asks, genuinely wanting to know. "What's wrong with them? Have they met you in person?"

Richie snaps the book closed abruptly, his head jerking up. Eddie can tell by the set of his mouth that he thought it was funny, but if he didn't know him so well, he wouldn't be able to tell. "You're not a very good therapist, are you? I looked up your Yelp reviews, you know."

"Therapists have Yelps?" Eddie asks. 

"Not very bright either, huh?" Richie makes a mock sympathetic sound, collapsing into one of the armchairs with all of his weight. The entire chair scoots backwards beneath the force of his limbs, making an obnoxious screeching noise against the hardwood. "Well." He waves one of his big hands. "Blond."

"That's actually a misconception, you know," Eddie says. "Blond people are actually much more intellectual than brunettes. Albert Einstein was blond, you know."

"Pretty sure he fucking wasn't," Richie says, tilting his head. There's definitely an open smile on his face now - small, but present, which makes Eddie feel a bit victorious. "He had like, dark black hair, dude. Until he got old and it turned white."

"No, he was blond. I'm pretty sure I'm right," Eddie says blandly. "Noam Chomsky, Jane Gooddall, Alan Greenspan, Umberto Eco...all blonds."

"You're full of fucking shit. Literally none of those people have blond hair," Richie accuses, hiding his smirk behind his fist. "Is this a technique? Are you trying to bullshit me into liking you?"

"No, I'm just talking about how smart I am," Eddie says. "Why? _Do_ you like me?"

"Not really," Richie says, which is fair. "I think you're kind of a dick, and you look like an asshole in that tie, man."

Eddie looks down at himself. It was the only tie he could find in Timothy Beaumont's closet, and paired with another one of the loose button ups that comprise ninety percent of Timothy's wardrobe, it does look weird. But it had calmed Eddie down that morning, so. "Yeah, well." He tugs it off. "Maybe I was trying to impress you."

"I genuinely cannot tell if you keep flirting with me as a joke or what, but I was telling the truth when I said no thanks," Richie says, somewhat belligerently. "Genuine question, Tim: are you like this with all your clients, or just the gay men? Like is this how you pick people up? Because that's pretty sad, my man."

Eddie doesn't say anything for a second, violently taken aback by Richie's casual reference to himself as gay at the same time that he feels a powerful rush of longing, so intense it makes his throat tighten up. Fuck, he'd had somewhat of a clue, when Richie had said he'd never been married, but - well. Eddie was sure it was wishful thinking, at best. "But you were lying about seeing someone?"

Richie just shrugs. He looks tired, rubbing his cheekbone beneath his glasses fastidiously, the book cracked open in his other hand against his thigh, like he needs something to hold onto. "Is that what you wanna talk about? My sex life?"

"Is that what _you_ wanna talk about?"

"Jesus fucking Christ. I've seen this movie," Richie mutters. "No, I don't particularly want to talk about fucking anything, Dr. Beaumont. You're the one who bullied me into coming here, why don't _you_ lead the conversation, huh?"

Eddie maybe feels a little bad about that, in the light of a new day. "Well," he says, tossing the tie over on top of the desk, missing the edge of the laptop screen by only half an inch. "Your agents, or managers, or whoever they are - Kenya and Steve - sounded really worried. I figured it was my duty as a Hippocratic Oath-taking physician to at least try to follow up." Richie is looking at him strangely, like he can't figure Eddie out, which makes him feel thrilled, and a little sexy, like the few times in high school when Eddie managed to catch him off guard, or surprise him. Richie has never been the easiest person to get one over on - much smarter and craftier than anyone ever gave him credit for, and with balls of steel on top of it - sometimes Eddie wondered why Richie bothered to hang out with him at all. Eddie had to have slowed him down constantly, with all his huffing and puffing and debilitating anxiety issues. "From their emails it seemed like they're good friends to you. I felt bad."

"You felt sorry for me, you mean," Richie corrects. 

"If that's how you wanna put it."

Richie doesn't say anything for a second, tapping the book against his leg and staring off into the space above Eddie's head. It's extremely surreal to see all of his nervous energy muted, tamped down into a rumpled, tired version of himself. Eddie had considered just blurting it out, the second Richie sat down - just grabbing him by the face and saying _it's me, it's Eddie, what the fuck happened to us_ but looking at him now, he can see that's probably not going to go over very well. How the fuck would Eddie prove it, anyway? There are things that only Eddie would know, but how believable would it be to Richie, who's looking at Eddie in a completely different body, with a completely different, searchable life history behind him? He'd either call the cops or punch Eddie right in the face, and considering the tone of their conversation so far, Eddie would put money on the latter. 

Maybe antagonizing him into showing up wasn't the _best_ idea in the world. 

"I've been to a lot of therapists," Richie says, somewhat out of the blue. Eddie blinks a little in surprise; the silence had felt comfortable, natural. To Eddie's estimation, at least. "They usually don't send emails like that. You can tell me the truth if Kenya put you up to this."

"She put me up to it in the sense that she booked you the appointment," Eddie says. "Didn't you just say you looked up my Yelp reviews?"

Richie shrugs. "You could be a Scientologist or something. They pay to keep their reviews clean online. Are you a Scientologist?"

"Fuck no," Eddie says, without thinking about it, and _finally_ , he gets a laugh. "Are you?" he asks, somewhat dreading the answer. 

"Are you kidding? Don't you think I'd be a lot more famous if I was?" Richie says with a scoff. "I got to like, level, I don't know. Three or something. Then they labeled me a suppressive person after I fucked one of the monitor guys, since they don't believe in homosexuality, and all that. I think they still have my name on a list at the front desk of the Celebrity Center downtown."

Eddie winces, both at the story and again, at the casual reference to his sexuality. What does it mean that Richie is this open about it to a stranger, and that he never told Eddie? Never told the Losers? He had to have known they would've supported him, right? And Eddie - Jesus, as if he would've had any room to judge. "But you actually tried to join?"

"Tried? No. My agent back in the day made me go," Richie says. "This was before all the documentaries, and Leah Remini, and all that. They were like social mixers, you know. You went to the meetings, listened to them ramble about their weird religion for a while, and then chatted up some producers at the reception. You couldn't work in Hollywood without sitting through one of those things once a week, at least." 

"Sounds bleak," Eddie comments. 

"No kidding." Richie blinks, as if remembering where he is. "You didn't answer my question."

"Yes, I did," Eddie says. "I literally just said I'm not a Scientologist."

"That wasn't really my question, that was my witty way of asking my actual question," Richie says. 

"Okay, Willy Wonka, what's your actual question?" Eddie asks with a snort. Richie's eyebrows quirk up at the name, his mouth twitching. "I'm an open book."

"Are Kenya and Steve paying you to talk to me?" Richie asks bluntly. "And I don't mean whatever they would normally pay you, or what the insurance would pay you, or however it works. I mean did they call you up and tell you to do whatever you had to to get me in your office, in exchange for cash? Because they've done that before."

"Jesus," Eddie says, blowing out a long, slow breath. "No. That's...pretty unethical." Probably. He's guessing. 

Richie shrugs again. "It's how they got me into rehab the first time," he volunteers, watching Eddie's face the whole time. Eddie feels like a bug on a pin beneath his sharp gaze, assessed and cut up beneath the sharp pinprick of Richie's wary, unflinching eyes. "When I was thirty-two. They paid a therapist ten thousand dollars to convince me to enroll in a program, and it worked. And like, they mean well! Love 'em to death. They saved my life. But also, fuck them. And fuck you too, if that's what you're doing."

"That's not what I'm doing," Eddie says, and he must sound honest enough, because Richie relaxes minutely, his arms going loose against the leather chair. "What did that other therapist do, exactly?" he asks warily, unsure if he wants to know the answer. 

Richie just rolls his head around on his neck, making a noncommittal noise. "It was a long time ago," he says, as if that's a real answer, and not something bullshit you say when you don't want to actually answer somebody's fucking question. "I've known them both for a long time. They're pushy as fuck. Married, you know," he says, as if Eddie had asked, "to each other, which makes it all worse. I was the best man at their wedding, last spring. Took them fucking ages to actually do it. I gave my speech in character as Wes Mantooth, you know the character I played in Anchorman? They fucking hated it. Didn't speak to me for weeks." Richie sighs, in exaggerated fond memory. "Best month of my life."

"Really? Of your whole life?" Eddie asks skeptically. "Better than the first time you jerked off?"

"The first time I jerked off it was to a copy of _Men's Fitness_ I found in my dad's office lobby," Richie volunteers, with a _fuck you_ look on his face, like he's daring Eddie to react. "I was so ashamed of myself I cried afterward, and I threw the magazine away in the neighbor's garbage can. I still can't look at the magazines in doctor's offices without feeling a little sick to my stomach."

"Well," Eddie says slowly, trying to digest _that,_ "that sounds like a 'you problem.'"

Richie guffaws in surprise, his head tilting back against the chair. Eddie sits up a little straighter in his own, feeling accomplished. 

"Is this what _you_ normally do?" he asks after a second, when Richie's laughter has mostly subsided. "Try to keep people off guard, telling intimate stories about yourself so they're too awkward and shocked to actually talk to you?"

"Okay, ouch," Richie says, shaking his arm and looking at his bare wrist, conspicuously missing a watch. "How long have I been here? Is it lunch break already?"

"You've been here for thirty minutes," Eddie says, unimpressed. "We have until noon."

"Jeee-zus." Richie winces. "You really are brutal. A brutal fucking asshole, huh?" He shakes his head. "They're worried about me. So what."

"So what? Isn't that reason enough to give this an actual shot?" Eddie asks, incredulously. "Do they have reason to be worried?"

"Sure," Richie says easily. "I'm having a rough time." He waves at himself ostentatiously, as if to say, _you can't tell?_ "But can you, specifically, Dr. Horny Asshole, help me through it? Hm. Jury's out."

"I don't have a PhD," Eddie says, confident about this, if nothing else. An MA is not the same as an MD. "You can just call me…" he chokes on the word 'Tim.' "My first name. Or whatever you prefer."

"Can I call you Daddy?" Richie asks. 

"Other than that."

"Not into it? Fine." That he gave up on the bit so easily, and didn't even break out one of his Voices, is telling enough about his mental state. Eddie frowns at him. "You weren't really hitting on me, were you? Are you one of those hippie straight guys that just come off super gay but really you just read a lot of self-help books?"

"Is 'read a lot of self-help books' code for being emotionally healthy? Is that what you mean by that?" Eddie asks. "I'm starting to think _you're_ hitting on _me._ "

"I'm not hitting on you," Richie says. 

"Are you sure? Do you wanna think about it for a second?"

"Like I said, you're not my type," Richie says dismissively, and even knowing what Eddie does, that he's sitting in a stranger's body that Richie has been predisposed to dislike, it still stings a little. "Besides, that's a little...soap opera-y. Don't you think? Sleeping with your therapist? Or do you do that a lot?"

"I feel like you're being a little combative," Eddie says, which is a word that Myra used to use a lot. _Combative._ One of her favorites. "Should we take a break and start over? I think Kelly has some granola bars in his desk, if your hunger is making you cranky."

"Well shit, Doc, you're the one who twisted my arm to get me here, I'm fucking here," Richie says, throwing out one of his hands. "I didn't know it was a requirement for therapy patients to be fucking pleasant to talk to."

"It's not," Eddie snaps, "but it's not a requirement for therapists to put up with their unpleasant patients, either."

"Wow." Richie laughs, without very much humor at all. His eyes are sparkling meanly. "You really are bad at this. I know I said that already, but _wow._ "

Eddie blows out a long, slow breath. "I'm gonna go get you a granola bar," he says, after a strained second. 

In lieu of a response, Richie, without even flinching, throws the book he's holding straight across the room and into the lamp on Timothy's desk, sending it flying over the edge and onto the floor with a loud crash. Eddie turns to look incredulously, at the mess on the floor, and then back at Richie, who is watching Eddie's reaction with a look on his face that Eddie has never seen before. 

He looks like a stranger, Eddie thinks. A sad, angry stranger. His heart is aching. 

"I don't want a fucking granola bar," Richie says after a second. The sound of the white noise machines is very loud, in the still, tense air between them. "Why did you email me? Tell me the truth."

"I emailed you," Eddie says carefully, watching the coiled strength in Richie's tense, clenching arms. It occurs to him for the first time that Richie is much bigger than he is - in both bodies, Eddie realizes. Both this one and his real one. The thought sends twin sensations of fear and anticipation curling down his spine, like a line of fire that curls beneath his skin. "Because I wanted to talk to you. Because I wanted you to talk to me."

"Because you want to fuck me?" Richie asks. 

"No. Jesus," Eddie says, taken aback by the way he'd said that, like it didn't mean anything. Like he was asking about the weather. "I apologize if - if it was inappropriate, but - "

Richie interrupts him with a laugh, shaking his head back and forth. "You really are straight? Steve said you had a reputation for - was he lying about that too? Jesus Christ."

"I'm not straight," Eddie says truthfully, without any idea one way or the other about Timothy Beaumont. But - well, the bar he'd been arrested outside of in that article, in West Hollywood. Eddie can put the pieces together. "And I'm not hitting on you. Both of those things can be true at the same time."

Richie is still laughing, low and a little manic, leaning forward on his knees and cradling his face in both hands, his shoulders hitching up and down jaggedly with each breath. Eddie wants to touch him so badly his palms are itching. 

"Rich. Richie," Eddie says, leaning forward himself, feeling the few feet between them stretch into miles, an uncrossable canyon. "Aren't you tired? I just want to talk. That's all." He swallows, gathering his courage. "Rich, I'm sorry, okay? It's...it's me. I know you're not gonna believe me, but it's me, I'm Ed - "

A loud rattling noise interrupts his sentence, the whole room rumbling like the earth itself has conspired to stop Eddie from finishing that sentence. The books on the shelf vibrate, the coffee cup on the desktop rattles back and forth on its coaster, the light fixture hanging from the ceiling swings back and forth gently. Richie stops laughing and looks up, gripping the arm of the chair he's sitting in until it stops. 

"Shit," he says after a second, "that one wasn't too bad. Probably not even a 4. Did you feel the one last week? The 6.1?"

"No," Eddie says, sitting back in his chair, resigned. "I didn't."

"Shit," Richie says again, looking around the room with a somewhat lost look on his face. Eddie's felt earthquakes before - he used to go to San Francisco a lot, for his first job out of college - but this one felt particularly vindictive. Not that it was all that strong - nothing even fell over. "I could use a fucking drink. You know what I mean? Quakes always make me wanna drink."

"So let's go get a drink," Eddie says belligerently. Richie blinks at him in surprise. "Yeah. C'mon. There's a bar down the street, we don't even have to drive." Eddie had Googled it. Probably one of the first things he'd done, on Timothy Beaumont's laptop: searched _nearest bar open early,_ and then memorized the general directions. There were at least two, actually, within walking distance.

Richie gapes at him for a long second, clearly struggling for words. "Aren't you a substance abuse counselor too?" he asks, after a too-long pause. 

"So? Are you planning on abusing?" Eddie asks, rising to his feet. He's furiously angry, all of a sudden. Angry at the body he's in, angry at himself for not saying it first thing. For playing along with this fucked up David Lynch screenplay in the first place. Angry at Richie, too, for being himself, for being a little unhinged. For not showing up and instantly reading Eddie's mind, recognizing him behind a strange face, sweeping in and making it all go back to normal. "Let's go. I want some vodka."

"Are you kidding me?" Richie asks, softly, as if he's talking to himself. He's still staring at Eddie in blank incredulity. "You've got to be fucking with me. Right? Kenya's paying you to fuck with me."

"Fine, stay if you want," Eddie says furiously, and turns on one heel. He doesn't wait for Richie to follow, and he doesn't look at Kelly - tapping boredly at his tablet, as usual - as he strides out of the office. He feels good like he always does when he does something unexpected, when he surprises people. He'd once quit a job by walking out in the middle of the work day, abandoning all his personal effects and flipping off one of the mean, vindictive receptionists on his way out. One of the best days of his life, all things considered. It had felt almost natural to do things like that - act out. Somewhere in-between that day, and where he'd ended up, with Myra at the end - Eddie had lost that kind of bravery. 

Or maybe not, he thinks, glancing back at the office out of the corner of his eye, seeing Richie scrambling to catch up to him on the sidewalk and Kelly, watching it all from the doorway with a bewildered look on his face. Maybe he just felt it, and ignored it. He'd gotten pretty good at that too, in the past ten years or so. Since his mother died, it had felt like the thing to do, somehow. 

Eddie orders a vodka and Coke, and finishes it by the time Richie sits down and gets his own order in, an entire empty bar stool between them, like he's afraid of catching Eddie's weirdo cooties. Eddie snags the bartender as she's walking away to make Richie's drink and motions for another one, ignoring the incredulous look from Richie, burning a hole into the side of his face. 

"Same tab?" she asks, a little warily, eyeing both of them. 

"Yeah, his is on me," Richie says quickly, nodding at the credit card in her hand. The bartender visibly gives up on being suspicious at that, giving Eddie back the twenty dollar bill he'd handed over for his first drink and walking away without another word. "She's cute. You come here often?"

"Don't use my line," Eddie says, rolling his eyes. "You want her number? I can move down a few more seats, pretend I rejected you."

"Like that'll help?" Richie scoffs. "No. I don't want her number."

Eddie shrugs, not knowing what else to say, tilting the empty glass back and crunching on some ice. There's a mirror above the bar, and Eddie catches a glimpse of his own, unfamiliar, jarring reflection, and flinches violently. 

"You good?" Richie asks. He sounds more like himself, not at all like the confrontational stranger he'd been back at the office, concerned and a little curious. "You're acting real weird, man. I felt like I had to come after you, in case you were about to go shoot up a post office or something."

"How do you know I'm acting weird? Maybe this is how I always act. You don't know me."

"No," Richie says, "but I know therapists." He squints at Eddie, leaning backwards slightly as the bartender returns with his drink - bourbon, straight. Eddie frowns at the glass. "You don't act like a therapist."

"I'm not really a therapist," Eddie says, nodding at the bartender as she hands over his fresh vodka Coke. "It's all a scam. I actually get off on listening to people's problems."

"Knew it," Richie says crisply, smacking his lips.

"No, really. You should call and report me right now. I should go to jail, probably. I'm the Pee Wee Herman of grief counselors, it's disgusting."

"Maybe later," Richie says. "We'll see how the night goes. What I'm feeling in an hour or two. You never know."

Eddie scoffs. "I'm still not hitting on you."

"And you're still not my type." Richie sips the bourbon like a pro, like an old man in a mobster movie, the highball held loosely in his long fingers. Eddie shivers a little, looking at his hands, the corded tendon in his right wrist, elongated with the stretch of his arm against the bartop. His tan, hairy forearms that flare into biceps, to broad shoulders, to a neck that holds up a sharp jaw that's always made Eddie's mouth water, whether at thirteen or sixteen or forty-one, what's the difference? "You are checking me out, though. You have been since the second I walked in. You can see how I might be getting a few mixed signals, here."

Eddie scoffs. "I am not."

"You are too," Richie says incredulously. "You were staring at my ass when I was looking at the books."

"I was fucking _not,_ " Eddie says, hot under the collar. He so totally had been. 

"Are you having a nervous breakdown?" Richie asks skeptically. "Is that what this is? If so, I do feel kind of honored to bear witness, but I'm sort of in the middle of a breakdown of my own and I'm not really up for the emotional responsibility at the moment. You understand."

"I'm feeling kind of skeptical about the assumption that anyone would trust you with emotional responsibility," Eddie says. "Regardless of the magnitude."

"You talk like a philosophy major," Richie says with a mean grin. "In and out, circly sentences. It's kind of hot."

"Thought I wasn't your type," Eddie says, hot under the collar for a different reason, this time. 

"You're not. But it's hot," Richie says definitively, knocking back the last splash of amber in his glass. "So what's the deal. Tim? Should I call you Tim?"

"If you have to," Eddie says darkly. 

"Are we about to get out of here, Tim?" Richie asks, sliding his empty glass down towards the end of the bar, waving it at the bartender for a refill. "No - don't order another one. Give me a sec to catch up, at least."

Eddie makes an effort to sip a little slower. "Not sure I know what you mean by that."

Richie just scoffs, growing silent as the bartender fixes him another glass. They watch her progress in charged silence, which probably doesn't do much to raise their estimation in her opinion, but Eddie's already shoved the twenty in her tip jar, so hopefully that will help. 

"I'm not going home with you," Eddie says flatly, once she's walked away. 

"Did I invite you?" Richie asks, sneering a little. Eddie feels hurt, even though he deserved that, even though he knows Richie wouldn't talk to him like this if he knew it was Eddie he was talking to - but somehow, that also hurts a little. That Richie would never be this open with Eddie, that he'd never lean against the bar with his hips wide open and his shoulders curved invitingly, if he knew it was _Eddie_ doing the looking. "Finish your fucking drink."

"Don't tell me what to do," Eddie snaps, on instinct, something he used to say to his _mother,_ in the exact same tone of voice, he realizes with horror. 

Richie just laughs, in genuine amusement, as if Eddie has just told a joke and not let some of his lifelong trauma slip out of his mouth accidentally. "You're the strangest bastard I've ever met," he says, and the way he says it, it sounds dirtier than some actual dirty talk that Eddie has endured, in the long, weird journey of his sex life. "Come on. Finish. Your goddamn miniature parking lot was full, so I didn't actually park that far away from here."

"You're very presumptuous," Eddie says, trying to muster up the moral fortitude to cut this off where it is, to turn around and leave, to stop looking at Richie's thighs. He looks ridiculous, walking around in a swimsuit and sandals, in the middle of the fall - it's not even that hot outside. For some reason though, Eddie's into it. Typical. "I just said I wasn't going to go home with you."

"I'm not taking you home," Richie says, slamming the rest of his drink. "I'm taking you somewhere else. You want a sippy cup for that or are you gonna finish?"

"Fuck you," Eddie says. It's probably the most honest thing he's said all day. 

"I mean," Richie says, shrugging and leaving the sentence open. Eddie feels the pointed edge of his eye contact all the way down to his toes. Is this what it feels like, he wonders? Is this what it's _supposed_ to feel like? "You want help?"

"You're driving, aren't you?" Eddie says, and a satisfied, victorious look passes briefly over Richie's face, there and then gone again, in the span of a second. "Shut up and get off my back. Jesus."

Richie holds up two hands, looking viciously, vindictively amused. Eddie takes a long, slow drink just to fuck with him, feeling the carbonation bubble up in his throat, behind his nostrils. He very purposefully does not look in the mirror. 

"You really haven't done this before, have you?" Richie asks after a second, his voice pitched low and casual, like he's trying not to freak Eddie out. 

"Done what? Picked up one of my patients?" Eddie asks. "No. I fucking have not."

"Alright." Richie shrugs again, placing his empty highball on the rubber mat at the edge of the bar, carefully avoiding looking over. It feels almost polite, all things considered. "Good to know."

Eddie scowls at the side of his face, and drinks. He's not sure what else there is to do. 

Most of Eddie's hookups had been carefully controlled, under very strict circumstances and environments. Bars he was familiar with, restaurants where he knew the staff well enough to trust them to be discreet, but not so well he'd feel embarrassed taking a man there. He always made sure they had a place to live with relative privacy, so Eddie could avoid taking them back to his - well off men sometimes lived alone, especially years back before New York got so expensive, but even the younger, poorer men he met usually had a bedroom with a door that locked, at least. It was one of the reasons Eddie picked gay men who worked ultra professional, high profile jobs - they tended to be closeted, for one, and thus just as cautious as Eddie was. The other reason was that Eddie simply had more in common with those types of men, as opposed to the men he was _actually_ attracted to - brazen, wild, funny people with loud voices and personalities. Men that Eddie admired, men who were confident in themselves, affectionate, open about who they were and what they liked. People that reminded him of Richie, Eddie realizes now with a sinking stomach. 

Not that Richie is exactly out and proud - again, not that Eddie has any room to judge. If Eddie had gotten _any_ inkling of this from Richie's standup - any at _all_ \- maybe that dinner in Derry would've gone differently. Or the night after the dinner. Or the morning after the dinner. Or the moment as they were walking back from the clubhouse in the woods, when Richie stopped to shake a rock out of his shoe and Eddie leaned in and grabbed his arm to steady him as he was about to wobble and fall, and Richie had looked up, startled, his glasses a little crooked and his mouth already halfway stretched out into a smirk, and Eddie had had a wild thought that maybe he could get away with it - just once - 

" _Fucking_ traffic," Richie says, pounding one palm against the wheel in exaggerated frustration. "I'm too drunk to drive on the interstate, I don't know what I was thinking. Are you one of those, what do you call it, mandatory reporters? Are you legally obligated to turn me in for a DUI now?"

"No," Eddie says definitively, even though he has no fucking idea. "Pull off, if you want to then. You still haven't told me where we're going."

"Surfing," Richie says, easily and ludicrously. The sun is just starting to crest in the sky, and they've gotten caught up in the lunch rush hour, bumper to bumper stop and go on the 405. 

"Ugh, surfers," Eddie says, rolling his eyes. Richie shoots him a weird look. "What?"

"Dude," Richie says. " _You're_ a surfer. You _scream_ surfer. You had like three boards at your office just out in plain sight, you're not exactly subtle."

"They could be Kelly's," Eddie says defensively, realizing that he'd forgotten, just for a moment, what body he was in, and not knowing how to feel about it. 

"Who's that? Your pop punk secretary?"

"He's a receptionist," Eddie says, out of slight guilt for his behavior towards Kelly thus far. It'll be a miracle if Eddie gets though this without alienating fucking everybody in this guy's life, honestly. "He's very good at his job."

"Uh huh, I'm sure that's why you keep him around, for his scheduling skills," Richie says. 

"It's not like that."

"Dude, it's totally like that, I'm not even into tattoos and even I could see it was like that," Richie says, rolling his eyes. "Shut up, I'm trying to merge here."

"Use your fucking blinker! Oh my God," Eddie says, exasperated as Richie blithely cuts off an SUV, waving cheerfully out the window in response to the driver's angry honk. "You really will get a DUI if you get us pulled over, idiot. Get off the fucking highway."

"Woo, here we go," Richie says, laughing a little as he crosses two more lanes in one swoop, pissing off three more people all at once. There's something loose, in the sound of his laugh, that makes Eddie's stomach go tight and worried. "Let's just get off here. Do I know where I am? Not really! Guess we'll figure it out. Oh hey, a Popeyes. I haven't had Popeyes in forever."

"I'm not eating fried food with you," Eddie says. 

"You're kind of a picky date, you know that?" Richie says, hanging a left at the tail end of a yellow light. "Should we play 20 Questions? I used to play that with guys in my twenties, you know. It was like a cute flirty thing. Question one: do you do anal?" Richie takes another sharp turn, prompting Eddie to press his foot against the floor of the passenger side in instinctive anxiety, his hand scrabbling for a grip on the door handle. "Question two: who's your favorite Beatle? You know. Get to know you questions."

"Rich, maybe you should pull over and let me drive," Eddie says. 

"So that's a no on anal then?" Richie says, braking hard at a red light. Both of them pitch forward at the sudden stop, their shoulders hitting the seats at almost the same time. If Richie drove a less expensive, show off-y car, they definitely would've hit the car in front of them. "Ah. Can't win 'em all."

"Look at me. Look me in the eyes," Eddie demands, reaching out and tugging at Richie's arm. It's the first time Eddie's touched him, and the point of contact between his (..."his") palm and the skin of Richie's forearm feels lit up with electricity, a live wire of warmth that makes Eddie's hair stand up. "Did you take something? Are you high right now?"

"No. Fuck off," Richie says, pushing Eddie's hand away harshly. "You started this. Don't get all grandpa on me now."

"How did I start this?! You're acting _bizarre_ \- "

"Oh sorry, am I freaking you out? Am I behaving _erratically?_ " Richie says, hitting the gas hard the second the light turns green, speeding around the SUV in front of them with a squeal of tires. Eddie holds his breath until they get past the initial snarl of traffic at the corner, letting it go only when the road evens out to emptier lanes, a long open stretch that looks relatively obstacle-free. "You don't even know me. Maybe this is how I act all the time. Maybe Kenya and Steve are just pissed off that I canceled all my tour dates. They lost a lot of money on that, you know."

"I _do_ know you," Eddie says, but a horn blares right overtop of that sentence, distracting Richie long enough that he doesn't seem to hear. Eddie bites his lip, trying to breathe through the frustration. "You cancelled your dates? Like, all of them?"

"Yep," Richie says, popping the 'p.' "Reno, Salt Lake City, and LA. Seven shows, no go." He laughs, and Eddie hates himself a little for leaning forward, trying to see if his pupils are blown. (They aren't.) "Should I state the obvious one more time? I'm having a _rough fucking time!_ " He leans on the horn as he speaks, blaring it loudly and obnoxiously at a grandma in front of them, blocking the passing lane in her little gold sedan. 

"My God, ease up a little, you fucking asshole," Eddie says, frowning deeply at him. "Just pass her on the right if you really want to. Jesus."

"It's the principle of the thing, Doc," Richie says, and the nasal, intentionally obnoxious note to his voice makes Eddie grit his teeth. "So go on. Ask me another question. I already answered one, you get nineteen more."

Unwilling to pass up that sort of opportunity, no matter what sort of unhinged mood Richie's in, Eddie immediately asks, "who's your favorite Beatle?"

Richie snorts. "None of them."

"Not even Ringo? His sunglasses, man."

"Not even Ringo," Richie says somberly, switching lanes once again. Eddie relaxes again, once the grandma is in their rearview. "Also I'm taking away one of your questions for asking me something so lame."

"Unfair," Eddie says, chewing on his lip. "What were you in rehab for?"

"Whew, you don't fuck around," Richie says. "Say - you're not charging me for this, are you? The billable hours ended when we went to the bar, right?"

"Guess you'll find that out tomorrow," Eddie says, and Richie actually laughs. 

"Coke," he says, after a second. "What else?"

"Just coke?"

"Just coke. Not drinking." Richie shrugs. "Could probably use a refresher course, just for the booze, though. If I'm being honest. Say, do you wonder if that's how therapy works? Rehab therapy or otherwise? Like tuning up a car? You go long enough and you need to take yourself to the shop for some routine maintenance?" 

"As a mental health professional, I'm going to say that there are probably some limits to that metaphor," Eddie says, acutely aware as ever that he is _not_ a mental health professional. "But if it helps to think about it like that, then sure."

"Very condescending, thank you," Richie says. "What'd you major in, in college?"

"Is it my turn to answer questions?" Richie shrugs, swerving violently to avoid a blown tire, abandoned in the middle of the road. Eddie blows out an annoyed breath. "Business management," he says honestly. 

"You're fuckin' kidding," Richie says. "They let business majors get master degrees in head shrinking?"

"Occasionally," Eddie says, shrugging. "What'd you major in?"

"Didn't go to college."

"Bullshit. You went to UCLA," Eddie says immediately. He remembers like it was yesterday, the afternoon Richie got his acceptance letter. He made Eddie read it, too nervous to open it himself, and then they got into a screaming match afterwards, worked up and upset already about having to leave each other. Eddie's voice was hoarse, almost gone completely, by the time he left the Toziers' house that night. "I read it on your Wikipedia page."

"You Googled me?" Richie says, taking another turn. Eddie has no earthly fucking clue where they are, exactly, but Richie seems to know well enough where he's driving. Eddie really hopes he's not gonna try to take Eddie to a rent by the hour motel, or something. "Creepy or hot? Maybe both. That seems to be your niche, Timothy."

"Please don't call me that," Eddie says, pained. 

"What do you want me to call you then, baby?" Richie asks, reaching out to casually run his hand up Eddie's thigh. Eddie jumps violently, then flushes at Richie's mean-spirited laugh, slouching in his seat and yanking his leg away. "You go by a different name, when you do this?"

"I don't _do this,_ " Eddie says, his cheeks warm. "I told you. I don't."

"Okay, sure," Richie says. 

"Just call me - " _Eddie. Eddie. I'm Eddie. It's Eddie. Call me Eds. I would do anything to hear you call me Eds, just one more time, just once more, you had to know I never really hated it, you had to have figured me out._ " - whatever. Baby. Doc. Whatever. Just not my name."

"Is that how it is?" Richie murmurs. Eddie feels like he's on fire, seeing the look on his face, the messy sprawl of his body in the driver's seat. Eddie's never been the type of guy that got turned on by cars - he was a car guy himself, wouldn't that be narcissistic, in some way? - but as it is with most things, somehow when Richie does it, it hits all of Eddie's buttons, up and down and then back up again until he can't sit still anymore. "Okay. Whatever you want."

Whatever Eddie wants. He bites his lip, his vision suddenly blurry, the colors of the afternoon sun turning milky and surreal, tangled up in storm clouds against the horizon. What does Eddie want? He's never known how to answer that question. Myra's asked it enough times, and Eddie's never been able to give her a real answer. 

"Next question," Eddie says. "It's my turn to answer one. Probably."

Richie hums, reaching out with his hand again, faux-casual. Eddie watches the progress of his palm warily, careful not to make a sound or twitch that would dissuade him, and feels instantly drowned beneath the weight of Richie's hand on his knee. "Have you ever been with a man before?"

"Yes," Eddie says hoarsely, honestly. 

"And you liked it?"

"Why would I do it if I didn't like it?" Eddie replies, a little nonsensically. He feels blown to pieces already, just by the knowledge that Richie is touching him with intent. Touching him _on purpose._

"I dunno, why does anyone do anything?" Richie asks, his hand squeezing on Eddie's knee. It feels absent, an involuntary reflex. "Repression, self-hatred? Curiosity? A double dog dare at a sleepover?"

"Do you have the sort of friends that double dog dare you to sleep with men?" Eddie asks. 

"Yeah," Richie says, with a high pitched laugh. "Why do you think I'm doing this?"

Eddie is struck silent. 

"Bev's gonna lose her shit when I tell her about you," Richie says, darkly and a little hushed, like he's telling Eddie a secret. He turns his head, and just for a second, Eddie sees his eyes - warm, grey blue, as familiar as the sky above Eddie's head - but then he turns away again, in the space of just a blink, and it's like he was never looking at Eddie at all. 

Richie drives for forty more minutes, a circuitous route that makes Eddie feel uneasy, like they're in a spy movie or something. But Richie, when pressed, just says he's avoiding the interstate.

"Gee whilikers," Richie says, in one of his favorite Voices back when they were kids, a 1950s newscaster that is, admittedly, much more polished now, "how long have you lived in LA, kitten? You don't know your way around?"

"Guess not," Eddie says, "I don't drive much."

"Walk everywhere? Take the bus?" Richie shoots him a sideways look, as he pulls the car up to a dark parking lot, in front of what looks like an apartment building. "Lemme guess. Uber to work every day, walk to the beach every afternoon to catch some evening waves? Those boards were pretty snazzy looking, man."

"I have a car," Eddie says, because it's true, Timothy Beaumont does own a car. Not a great car, but it's a car. "I thought you didn't want me to see your place?"

"I don't," Richie says, yanking the keys out of the ignition. "This ain't my place. It's Steve's."

"Seriously?"

"He and Kenya bought a little bungalow down in Santa Ana, so he rents this one out on AirBnB," Richie says. "It's empty right now, though. I've been using it the past few weeks as sort of, I dunno. An office. I can't concentrate in my house." Richie shakes his head irritably, like he's trying to ward off an intrusive thought. "It's clean, I promise. You into it or not?"

The sun has started to turn hot, the bare yellow of high afternoon; they've been driving around the city now for a couple hours. Eddie looks up at the building and thinks, _this is the stupidest thing I've ever done._ Considering all the stupid decisions he'd made in the last few days of his memory, up to and including his decision not to turn heel and run at the first mention of Pennywise, that's really saying something. "You got booze up there?"

"Of course."

"Then I'm into it." 

"Hot damn." Richie whistles through his teeth. "Well come on then snake, let's rattle." His sandals slap loudly against the pavement as he tumbles out of the car. 

The apartment building is nice, fancy, with a doorman and a glass elevator that makes Eddie feel twitchy, specifically because he can see his not-reflection in the glass. Richie notices, because of course he does, he notices fucking everything, and gives Eddie another one of those steadying, wary looks, like Eddie is a crossword puzzle that Richie can't solve. Not that Richie's ever sat still long enough to complete an entire crossword puzzle in his life. 

"You should unbutton a few of these," Richie says in the elevator, reaching out and flicking the top button on Eddie's shirt. "Let your tits breathe a little."

"I'm a man, I don't have tits."

"Yes you do. They're just uglier than a woman's," Richie says, just as the door opens. He tugs Eddie out onto what is obviously the penthouse floor, the wallpaper suddenly a few shades nicer, the wall sconces fancier, with fake lace around the lampshades. "You allergic to anything?"

"What, do you have a cat?" Eddie asks in dismay. He hates cats.

Richie smirks. "No, I was asking for a kinkier reason."

Eddie immediately flushes, all of the possible kinky reasons someone might need to ask that question immediately springing to mind. "I never said I was going to fuck you," he says. "You're still being sort of presumptuous."

"I literally just asked you if you were 'into it,' not even ten minutes ago, and you said 'yes,'" Richie says, tugging a key ring out of his pocket and stopping at a door marked with a brass door stopper. 

"Into coming up for a drink, yes. Into getting tied up and fucked? Jury's still out."

"Interesting that you just assumed which role you would take in that situation," Richie muses out loud, smirking up at the door as he unlocks it. The second he turns the doorknob, Eddie hears a series of scuffling sounds, followed by what is very clearly a dog's bark, and turns to give Richie a dry look. "What? I could've been asking for both reasons. Pets _and_ kink."

"Let me in so I can meet your dog, dickwad," Eddie says, elbowing him aside. The foyer of the apartment is nondescript, white walls and no furniture, but the dog is anything but: a dappled, friendly Australian shepherd with a stunning coat, a gorgeous mix of brown, white, grey, and gold. Either a puppy, or a mixed breed that was smaller than usual, it looked like, with eerily bright blue eyes. Eddie kneels down to pet him, smiling despite himself. He'd always wanted a dog. Since he was just a little kid, probably. "Oh, look at you. Look at you! What are you doing in this gross man's apartment? Did he kidnap you from someone respectable? You can tell me. Yes you can."

"Oh my God, that's cute," Richie says, sounding disgusted. "Apollo, sit." The dog, obviously well-trained, jerked his head up at Richie's finger snap, jumping down from Eddie's lap to the floor and sitting down obediently. "His name is Apollo. Apollo, this is Tim, but he doesn't like his name so we're calling him Doc." Leaning down, looming over Eddie in a way that makes Eddie's shoulders twitch, Richie rubs the dog's head, scratching affectionately behind one ear. Apollo's tail wiggles back and forth against the floor, sweeping dust bunnies side to side across the tile. 

"You named your dog Apollo?" Eddie asks, surprised. Not exactly the sort of name he would've thought Richie would pick. 

"He's not actually mine. I'm dog-sitting for a couple friends of mine," Richie explains. "They went yachting. Can you believe that? That I'm friends with people who use 'yacht' as a verb? Neither can I." Brushing past them both and into the cavernous hallway, Richie's voice fades a little as he gets further away. "It's not _their_ yacht, if it makes you feel better about having sex with me. It belongs to one of his clients, I think. My friend Ben, I mean. They invited me to go with them but I weighed very seriously the possibility that I would throw myself into the ocean at some point and ultimately, I decided against it. Apollo!" A shrill whistle, and Apollo nearly launches himself down the hallway, scrabbling his nails against the floor in his haste. Eddie follows with a half-smile on his face, turning a corner to see Richie in a kitchen, shaking dog food out of a tupperware container and into a blue bowl on the floor. 

Eddie's thinking about the picture he'd seen on Richie's twitter, the sunset from a boat. Ben and Bev, Eddie thinks, with a heartfelt pang of longing. "Good friends of yours?" he asks, trying not to sound desperate. "Maybe you should've gone. There's nothing more relaxing than the ocean."

"You would think that," Richie says with a scoff, and Eddie remembers that Richie thinks he's a surfer, at the current moment. "They're good friends, yeah. They're sort of." Richie waves his palm back and forth in the air, the universal sign of _ehh._ "In a moment, right now."

"A moment?"

"You know how it is. She left her husband for him, the divorce isn't going well. You fight, you get insecure. They needed some privacy, I thought." Richie shrugs. "They'll be fine."

Eddie desperately wants to push, but Richie's face looks closed-off enough, he doesn't want to make it worse. "Ah."

"You ever been married, Doc?" Richie asks. 

Eddie weighs the possibility that Richie might already know the answer to this, from his Googling of Timothy Beaumont, and decides to do what he's been doing all day: say _fuck it_ and tell the truth. "Yes. I'm technically...still married."

Richie's eyebrows shoot to the top of his forehead. "Wow, okay."

"Only technically. I haven't seen her in awhile," Eddie says. "We were all but done with each other even before I left. Long before that," Eddie says dryly, thinking grimly about the nights of stony silence, over the past year or so. The shrill phone calls, the strained dinners at her mother's house. He shudders. 

"Why haven't you gotten a divorce, then?" Richie asks, sounding faintly suspicious. Eddie doesn't blame him. 

"It's...a complex issue. Legally speaking," Eddie says, because if he tries to say _well I might be dead or in an alternate universe, hell if I know,_ he might prompt the universe into sending him another earthquake or something. "We're working on it."

"Alright then," Richie says, turning abruptly, stepping neatly over Apollo to get to a pantry above the sink. "If there ever was a better cue to break out the whiskey, I haven't heard one."

"What kind of whiskey do you have?" Eddie says, taking a seat on a barstool at the counter. Apollo lifts his head from his food bowl and eyes Eddie's feet speculatively, then turns back and keeps chomping, apparently disinterested. 

"Good stuff. Don't worry," Richie says, pulling an unlabeled bottle out from one of the cabinets. "This is what I drink before I cry myself to sleep at night. You'll like it."

"Oh, great," Eddie says, watching Richie carefully. He doesn't know how much to believe, but that had sounded a little too honest. "Whose turn is it now? I lost track."

"Oh, are we still doing that? Okay," Richie says, pouring two fingers each into a pair of small, relatively clean-looking water glasses. "Hm, let me think. Why'd you leave your wife?"

"Because I never should've married her in the first place," Eddie says, threading his hand beneath Richie's arm to snag one of the glasses. "Have you ever been married?"

"No. Got close once, but no," Richie says. He tilts his glass back, the liquor going down nice and easy. He doesn't even wince. "Turns out it's not a great idea to try and marry a woman when you're not sexually attracted to them."

"No shit," Eddie says, feeling sad and disturbed, restless on Richie's behalf, pushy to know more. "You're closeted, right? I mean, obviously."

Richie snorts loudly. 

"You were just very quick to tell me, sort of open about it - I was surprised. What did Steve tell you about me exactly?"

"That he hooked up with you once," Richie says, causing Eddie to choke on his mouthful of whiskey. Richie laughs. "What - you didn't remember?"

"Uh, no, I just - " Eddie pounds his chest. "I didn't think he would tell you? That's all?" Jesus fucking Christ, he thinks. 

"Back in the day, he said, before he and Kenya got together. Don't worry, he's discreet," Richie says, winking. "So you can see why I'm a little skeptical when you say 'really, I _never_ do this!'" His imitation of Eddie's voice is, at best, in poor taste. 

"It - was a long time ago," Eddie stutters, trying to recover. "Does Kenya know? She didn't really...indicate anything, in her email."

"I dunno. I don't get in their business," Richie says, pouring himself more whiskey. "Here," he says, holding out the bottle. "It's good, right? My friend Mike works at a distillery, he sends me some good shit."

"A distillery?" Eddie says incredulously, before he can stop himself. "Are you serious?"

"Yeah, some place out in Denver," Richie says, shrugging. "He likes it."

Eddie grumbles to himself petulantly. Do they not have wifi in Denver? He's too busy mixing up whiskey or whatever - Eddie doesn't know how distilleries work - to check his fucking emails?

"That's the real reason they got you involved, isn't it?" Richie asks, swilling the liquor in his glass, watching Eddie closely. "Mike. I've been sending him money, and Steve and Kenya are all bent out of shape about it."

"Well," Eddie says slowly, "I guess it depends on how much money you're sending. If you're asking me whether or not they have a real reason to be concerned, that is."

"That's not really any of your business, is it?" Richie says, taking another drink. "It's my money. Not theirs. Not sure why they care."

Eddie softens. "Rich, they care because they're your friends."

Richie just scoffs, turning his face away to look out the small window. 

"You don't have to indulge them, you know. If you don't trust their intentions," Eddie says. "I'm sort of getting the impression here that you don't believe me when I say they care about you."

"And you got that impression how, exactly? From a blowie Steve gave you at a party eight years ago, and an email from Kenya?" Richie rolls his eyes. "Pretty big stretch there, Doc."

Eddie shrugs. "You're right. I don't know much. My impression could be wrong." He tilts the glass back to take a drink, a real one this time, and feels his throat warm instantly at the liquor. Smooth, with just a hint of spice. Yeah, good fucking stuff. "She did mention the money in her email. But like I said - I don't know your life. I'm certainly not trying to...manipulate you on their behalf, or whatever it is you're thinking."

"Well, if you are, you'd be a master class," Richie says. "Look at you. Barefoot in my kitchen after what, five hours? You've got the last guy beat by a couple weeks, at least."

"The last guy?" Eddie asks, alarmed. "Are you talking about the other therapist, the guy they paid to - "

"Never mind," Richie interrupts, refilling their glasses again. "Here. Have some more."

Eddie retreats, worried and heartsick, and lets him pour. Apollo, at Eddie's feet, makes a whiny noise, his head knocking against the wooden slats on Eddie's chair. 

"I thought you said this wasn't your apartment," Eddie says, after a long beat of silence, once it becomes clear that Richie's not going to be the one to break it. 

Richie gives him a blank look. "What?"

"You said 'my kitchen.' Just now."

Richie laughs, in sudden recognition. "I bought it for him," he says. "Years ago. Guess I never fell out of the habit," he says, tapping the bottom of his glass against the counter. 

Put like that, Eddie is starting to see why Richie sounds so bitter. "Do you even like him?" he asks. "Steve, I mean."

Richie shrugs. "Does it matter?" he says, knocking one of his knees against the cabinet below the counter, making a hollow thud sound. Eddie stares at him in silence, unable, for once, to come up with even a single thing to say. 

This is so far unlike any other hookup situation that Eddie has been in - for one thing, Richie has barely even touched him so far. He seems much more interested in getting blasted than he does in getting into Eddie's pants, also - probably because he still seems to resent Eddie's presence in his apartment, regardless of how pushy he was in getting him here. 

Not that Eddie's taking that personally. The longer Eddie spends in Richie's company, the sharper his concern becomes; he's clearly on the downswing of _some_ kind of nervous breakdown. He barely sits still for more than a few seconds and his demeanor, which swings wildly between darkly lascivious and angry, has a tinge of true mania to it. 

They drink whiskey at the kitchen counter, then in a small living room with the remnants of Richie's breakfast, left carelessly on a coffee table beneath a rectangular window with a series of stained glass decorations hanging from the ceiling. They cast odd little colorful patterns on the side of Richie's face as he lounges in an armchair, glinting off his glasses in a way that sort of takes Eddie's breath away. 

"Kenya's niece made these in some kind of class," Richie tells him, flicking one of them with one knuckle. "Kids, huh? Cute shit. Do you smoke?"

"No," Eddie says, and doesn't say, _and you shouldn't either._

"Oh cool neither do I," Richie says, pulling a pack of cigarettes out of a leather pouch, sitting in a spot of relative honor on the window ledge. Eddie can see a marijuana pipe as Richie rummages around in it for a lighter. "Does it bother you?"

"Yes," Eddie says. "I have sensitive lungs."

Richie snorts. "Okay," he says, lighting up. "Steve told me not to smoke on his furniture, but you know. Fuck Steve."

"Okay." Eddie wrinkles his nose at the smell of Richie's first drag, but it never really bothered Eddie as much as he used to pretend it did. He never really had asthma, after all. All it does now is remind him of high school, of sitting elbow-to-elbow with Richie on the school bus, leaning his shoulder against the seat so Richie could smoke out the back window without alerting the bus driver. Lifting up on his knees on the seat every so often to exhale out the window, ashing into an empty Coke can, using the shield of Eddie's body to hide from the mirror. Richie used to trade him something for helping to cover him like that, on the bus - candy? Booze? Eddie can't remember. He would've done it anyway, no matter how much he'd bitched. "How drunk are you?"

"Drunk enough to fuck you, my dear," Richie says, in a weird Voice that sounds sort of like a cross between a Grandma and a Jimmy Stewart impression. "Why, you having second thoughts?"

Eddie doesn't really think sex is even on the table, at this point, considering the trajectory of the afternoon thus far, but whatever. Not that Eddie had seriously considered the concept of fucking Richie like this, the idea of fucking anybody in this stranger's body - but _Richie,_ of all people? Given any amount of critical thought, the idea feels abhorrent, inherently _wrong,_ that the first time Eddie got to see Richie naked would be in a situation where Richie couldn't see him back. But Eddie's been playing it fast and fucking loose thus far, which is how he's ended up here in the first place. Both in character for him and also, not. Par for the course considering Eddie's normal patterns of behavior, really. "No. Just thought we should switch to water." Eddie nudges Richie's hand with his knee, sliding down in his own chair to reach. Richie blinks at him, as if surprised that Eddie touched him at all. "Or something else. Coffee. I can make it, if you like."

Richie squints at him. "Are we back to therapy now?"

"I don't know. I don't even know what we're doing here," Eddie says honestly. "I told you I wasn't going to go home with you, and you just took that as an open invitation to kidnap me and drive me to...where the fuck are we, anyway?"

"Long Beach," Richie says, in a dry tone of voice like he thinks Eddie's an idiot. 

"Oh." Eddie considers this. He's only been to Los Angeles twice, once in college for an ill-advised Spring Break trip, and again when he was thirty-two, for a job interview that had gone very badly. "I don't get out much."

"No fucking shit," Richie says. His whiskey glass is stained with fingerprints by now, and mostly empty; Eddie watches with an itchy throat as he tilts it back against his mouth, catching the last of the liquid on his tongue. Eddie used to think about Richie's mouth a lot, almost obsessively so from the ages of thirteen to seventeen (and idly in the years after, although the image was a fuzzy one disconnected from actual memory, more like a persistent horny intrusive thought that would pop up at inopportune moments, such as in the middle of networking events or, more humiliatingly, when he was attempting to have sex with his wife). As a forty-year-old man, Richie is both less attractive than he was at seventeen - skinny knees, wild curls, big eyes, bigger laugh - and yet somehow _more_ at the same time, with those wide, strong shoulders and the beard that looks surprisingly well-groomed up close. It's a different sort of attractiveness, one cultivated to appeal to forty-year-old Eddie, maybe, the version that knows what he likes and spends a lot of time lying about it. There's an SAT question buried in Eddie's desire: he wants Richie, ergo, Richie is bad for him. Richie's big, strong hands and thick, tree trunk thighs are to Eddie's libido as Richie's booze body odor is to Eddie's _____ ? (Extra points for complete sentences.) 

The contradiction there is honestly part of the appeal; Eddie never wanted Richie more than when he was being a shithead. The margin of error between _shut the fuck up Richie_ and _put your mouth on me Richie_ is very small, and Eddie has always known this. It's part of why he gets so mad so easily; the burden of keeping them on the platonic side of the cliff is Richie's, because Eddie just doesn't think he's strong enough to resist, if Richie should ever look over and _see,_ reach out and _ask_. _Don't touch me / touch me / fuck off / fuck me,_ and all of it balanced simply on Richie's obliviousness to the drooling desires of Eddie's heart. A deeply sad tango. 

If Eddie is dreaming - and he might be, the thought has occurred to him several hundred times over the past few days, that he's actually in a coma or something, and wouldn't that be a convenient answer - he could do it. He has a convenient opportunity to do so, because here he is, tree-trunk thighs and all, sitting across from Eddie and _offering._ But Eddie also can't fucking stand the look on Richie's face right now - a sort of eerie blankness, a detachment that Eddie recognizes from Derry. The look that adults would get, he realizes with a chill. When grownups would go blank around the weird shit, get this absentness in their eyes because they couldn't see what the kids could see. The thought of touching Richie when he looks like that makes Eddie want to punch himself in the face, just on principle. Just for considering it. 

"We could just talk, if you want," Eddie offers, mostly because of the strange look on Richie's face and the coiled tension in his arms, like he's about to get up from his chair and _do something._ What that something might be, Eddie doesn't want to know. "I think that's why you really brought me here. Right? You want someone to talk to."

"Okay, Doc," Richie says witheringly. "You didn't have to get in the car."

"No. I didn't," Eddie says definitively, leaning forward for his own glass. He's got to be three or four behind Richie, at this point, but he doesn't feel drunk. Just tired, the way booze makes you feel when you're drinking beer outside, like it's draining your energy and giving you a headache and skipping the tipsy portion completely. "I won't even bill you."

"I can afford you," Richie says, and then goes quiet, his expression shifting over into a somber sort of sadness. The lack of a prostitution joke is telling in and of itself. "I don't want to talk about my problems. Kenya and Steve want me to talk about them because they think it will snap me back to normal, like bam! In therapy. Cured. They make pills for everything nowadays, right?" 

"You really don't like them much, do you?" Eddie asks. 

"I was the best man at their wedding," Richie reminds him, the words loping out of his mouth unevenly, like he wasn't sure where the sentence was going, even when he was in the middle of it. 

"That's not an answer."

"Well. Yeah." Richie shrugs expansively. "I met Steve when I was twenty-one. Right out of the gate, first week in LA. Ran into him at a gay bar. Isn't that poetic? Two baby gays. Well, one baby gay and baby Steve, who doesn't like labels." Richie laughs a laugh that does not sound particularly amused. "He's made me a lot of money. And vice versa."

"What about your other friends?" Eddie asks, trying not to sound too eager. "Mike, and - Ben, was it?"

"What about them?" Richie asks, the highball glass pressed against the side of his jaw. He's working it back and forth, leaning the weight of his face against it, wiggling it compulsively with the motion of his cheek. 

"They care about you. Don't they? They'd want you to talk to someone about all of this."

"I talk to them," Richie says. 

"You could talk to me too," Eddie says, hearing the want displayed too obviously, scraped clean by the words. He winces. "I just mean - obviously something happened - "

"I don't want to talk about what happened," Richie says abruptly, setting the glass down on the table, next to his ashtray, with a dull clink. "What's your game here, anyway? You don't want to fuck me, you don't want to drink." Richie nods at Eddie's glass, still half-full. "I was kidding before, but if we really are still in a therapy session I feel like I have a duty to tell you that that's super fucked up, man. I really might report you to the board of therapy ethics, or what the fuck ever it is."

"I'm not really a therapist," Eddie says tiredly. "I already told you."

"Oh, you just pretend to be? Okay," Richie says, the nervous energy making the words come out high and tight. "Do you work for the mob? Is your office a front of some kind? Because that would track."

"No," Eddie says, deciding impulsively to go for it again. "I'm not a therapist at all. I'm not actually Timothy Beaumont, Rich, I'm Ed - "

Apollo barks loudly, interrupting Eddie mid-sentence. A loud crash from the kitchen makes Richie curse, his eyes sliding off Eddie to the hallway, and Eddie has to bite back an actual scream. 

"Apollo!" Richie calls, whistling sharply. "Shit."

Eddie reaches out as Richie starts to rise from the chair, almost frantic. "Wait, just wait one second. Let me just say this, okay? It's me, Richie, it's - "

Another bark, and another crash. And Richie isn't listening, anyway. "Hold on," he mutters, distracted, and brushes past Eddie's arm as he stands, shuffling on clumsy feet into the kitchen. Eddie collapses back into his chair with a scowl. 

His phone has been buzzing for the past hour against his hip; Eddie pulls it out as he forlornly listens to Richie talking to the dog in the kitchen and Apollo, barking back at him. Four missed calls, all from Kelly - Office, which Eddie does not read. Doesn't this guy have any actual friends?

Mike still hasn't emailed, or called. Or texted. Carrier pigeon'd. Eddie opens up his blog - the browser bar completes the url before Eddie even finishes the third letter - and sends him another message, vindictively. 

HEY MIKE HANLON, Eddie types, as Richie fumbles drunkenly around the kitchen, talking in a loud baby voice to the dog, who has apparently knocked over the trash can again. YOU PROBABLY DON'T BELIEVE ME, HUH? I THINK I'M DEAD. OR I DIED AT SOME POINT. NOT DEAD RIGHT NOW, OBVIOUSLY, BECAUSE I'M SITTING IN RICHIE'S LIVING ROOM. DOES THAT SOUND THREATENING? PROBABLY. I'M NOT GONNA HURT HIM, BUT I MIGHT GIVE HIM A BLOWJOB OR SOMETHING. WE'LL SEE HOW THE NIGHT GOES. 

Appropriately unhinged, Eddie thinks. Fuck it. Maybe he is dreaming. Maybe they're all dreaming, and when Eddie gets to the end of this storyline he'll wake up as a thirteen-year-old again, broken arm and everything.

DO YOU REMEMBER THE NIGHT BEFORE I MOVED AWAY, Eddie types, letting his hands pluck out whatever letters they want to, not engaging much in the process himself, WHEN YOU AND ME AND RICHIE WENT TO BILL'S HOUSE EVEN THOUGH IT WAS SITTING EMPTY AND BILL HAD ALREADY FORGOTTEN US? WE SNUCK INTO THE BASEMENT AND ATE MCDONALDS AND YOU ACTUALLY DRANK WITH US FOR ONCE AND THAT WAS NICE. RICHIE AND I STAYED UP ALL NIGHT AFTER YOU FELL ASLEEP AND HE TOLD ME THAT HE WOULD DIE BEFORE HE FORGOT ME AND I TOLD HIM THE SAME THING. DO YOU THINK THAT'S WHY THIS IS HAPPENING? I DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT CLOWN MAGIC BUT IT SEEMS LIKE TOO MUCH OF A COINCIDENCE. 

Eddie hadn't actually remembered that night until just now, when his hands discovered it for him. Richie, pale-faced and serious, wine drunk and leaning hard against Eddie's bent knees, muttering out of the side of his mouth, _I'll die, Eds, I swear to God I'll fucking die._ Eddie, preemptively miserable about the long, grey stretch of his future, as if the end game of his own self-inflicted neurosis was already inevitable. McDonald's french fries. Fried apple pies. There was a spider in Eddie's sleeping bag and Richie killed it for him, smacking his palm against the concrete floor until his skin turned red. _Won't hurt ya! Look, see? Just spider guts now!_ Shoving his dirty hand in Eddie's face and cackling when Eddie fell over in his haste to get away. 

I MISS YOU GUYS. I JUST WANT TO TALK TO SOMEONE, Eddie types, but that feels a little too pathetic. He leaves it in anyway. DID I DIE? I THINK I DID. I HOPE I TOOK IT WITH ME. 

He wants to say something else, to apologize to Mike, which is something Eddie kept meaning to do in Derry but there was never a good moment. To look him in the eye and say _I'm sorry. You shouldn't have had to do it. The rest of us should've remembered, should've noticed, should've offered at least._ But he doesn't know how to write that out in a way that would feel genuine, and the little message at the bottom of the text box says he only has forty-two characters left. 

PLEASE CALL, he ends on, and sends it. Like most things Eddie has said to the people he loves, it feels inadequate. Not much to do about that at the moment, though. 

There's a row of Bill's novels on a shelf in the living room, and Eddie keeps poking through them whenever Richie leaves the room to piss or take care of the dog, which is often. He floats back in, glass in hand, sits for a second, gets up, paces, shakes his head back and forth, does Voices, laughs, curses, leaves again. Eddie feels like an audience member of a nonsensical, deeply bleak one-man show. 

Is he doing drugs in the bathroom? Eddie's not sure. He doesn't _think_ so, but he has a hard time holding onto a thought, keeps interrupting himself in the middle of sentences. It's almost four; Eddie's been here for three hours. They've barely touched, and Eddie's stopped drinking. 

"Quinoa," Richie is telling him, "you stir that shit into mac and cheese. Heaven. Heavenly grub, Doc." There's something in his glass, Eddie thinks it _might_ be iced tea. It doesn't smell alcoholic, but it doesn't smell particularly like tea, either. He hasn't offered Eddie any of it. "I was a vegetarian for three years, you know."

"Oh God, why?" Eddie asks. 

"My girlfriend asked me to. Yeah, that girlfriend," Richie says. He's sitting on the coffee table at the moment, for some reason, and Eddie is reminded painfully of Bill's basement: Richie's weight, his cheek against Eddie's knee, the extra order of fries they always got for Eddie, because he was never allowed to have them normally and thus underfed by grease and salt, always ended up pilfering from everyone else's. "Figured since I couldn't get it up for her the least I could do is stop cooking bacon at the house."

"You lived with her?" Eddie asks quietly. The image is profoundly sad - Richie, younger, closeted, sharing a bed with a woman he didn't want. It had never actually occurred to Eddie that Richie might have had a Myra of his own. 

"Well, we almost got married. So yeah, we lived together. She was an actress, it helped both of us." Richie wiggles his head back and forth, like a sideways nod, which is a gesture Eddie doesn't know how to interpret. "We used to joke that it was a real, bona fide Hollywood relationship, as in not real at all. Like Rock Hudson and Doris Day."

"Rock Hudson never married Doris Day," Eddie says, very knowledgeable about Silver Age Hollywood due to his mother's super specific approved at-home hobbies, which were limited to movies from her cabinet, napping, and sitting in silence while she watched soap operas. "He married his secretary. Her name was like, Phyllis or something."

"What a terrible Hollywood name," Richie says, "no wonder it didn't last."

Eddie rolls his eyes. "It didn't last because Rock Hudson was gay, Richie."

"Well you don't have to be straight to keep a marriage healthy," Richie says, in a Voice that Eddie doesn't recognize. It's sort of eerie, like Richie is imitating someone specific that Eddie doesn't know, which he probably is. It sends a chill down Eddie's spine. "Well, anyway. She met a tae kwan do instructor and dumped me. For the best, probably." Richie toasts his ex-girlfriend silently, wiggling his glass of mysterious liquid in the air. "Everytime I eat a bacon cheeseburger, I think of her. My girl that got away."

"Thought that was Bev," Eddie says without thinking, realizing belatedly that Timothy Beaumont would have no context for the long-running joke about Richie and Bev having a middle school affair behind Bill's back. Richie used to harp on about that, the summer after ninth grade when Bev's absence had been most keenly felt, for just long enough that Bill would snap out of his lovesick funk and yell at him, which pulled double duty of distracting Ben out of his melancholy, too. 

If Richie thinks this is weird, he doesn't react. "Ah, Bev. Best guy I know." His eyes look almost feverish, in the late afternoon light. "I helped her pick out lingerie for the yacht. Is that weird? Does that get me into the official gay club? That's like glee club but with more explicit ass fucking, right?"

Eddie sighs. "Beep beep, Rich."

Richie doesn't react to that either. "She was all nervous. Made me hold her hand inside of Agent Provocateur. Jesus, why am I telling you this?" he laughs, shaking his head at himself. "She'd kill me."

"You can trust me," Eddie says, not wanting to try and tell Richie the truth again. The last two times he'd tried, attempting to just blurt it out before Richie could get distracted by another loud sound or conveniently placed distraction, Eddie's voice had literally cut out, his vocal cords sputtering out into a wet cough like the broken engine of a car. And the last attempt, twenty minutes ago, had been interrupted by a literal _air raid siren_ from outside, which apparently are being tested today of all days, because of course they are. He's gotten the hint by now, thanks. 

"Can I?" Richie lights another cigarette. "Are we still under doc/patient confidentiality?"

"I'm not a doctor, so I guess that's a bet you have to be willing to take," Eddie says. He waves his hand at the smoke, curling in the air between them. "Can't we go sit on your balcony? I don't want to get hotboxed in here with you."

"I don't have a balcony," Richie says, glancing over his shoulder at the balcony door. 

Eddie rolls his eyes. "Oh, it belongs to someone else? You rent the apartment, but not the balcony?"

"Oh you mean that balcony," Richie says. His face looks a little less absent, at the successfully landed bit. Eddie feels himself smiling in response, automatically. 

"Yeah that balcony," Eddie says, kicking his shin, "that one right there. With the fucking blue patio furniture from Target."

"I got that shit from Overstock dot com, fuck you very much," Richie says. "Target. Please. Who am I, Jeff Bezos? I don't make Target money."

Eddie chortles, whether at the joke or the idea of Richie thinking that Target is classy. Maybe both. "I bought my dining room table on Etsy."

" _Etsy?!_ " Richie demands, incredulously. "You bought furniture from fucking _Etsy?_ "

"It cost like twelve hundred dollars," Eddie confides, grinning at himself. Myra hadn't liked it; she wanted something that matched the living room set they bought at Ikea, something practical. Too fancy, she thought, with the bare wood and the weird, long benches that came with it instead of chairs, what would her mom think of it, isn't it pretentious? Eddie loved it, though. Loves it, still. He hopes he can get his hands on it somehow, if he makes it out of this alive and with his own face again. "You'd probably hate it. It's an antique."

"You don't know that. Do you have a picture? Huh? A picture of your fancy Etsy table that you carry around on your phone to show to people? Fucking show it to me."

"Maybe later, if you're good," Eddie jokes. "Come on. Let's sit outside for awhile. You look sweaty and gross, Rich, it's disgusting."

"What a fucking sweet talker," Richie jokes. "Yeah, sure, if it gets your dick hard, Eds. Let's go sit outside."

Eddie stops short, his heart stuttering inside his chest. "What'd you call me?"

"What?" Richie doesn't seem to have registered what he'd said at first, until he notices Eddie's expression. His face blanches, visibly catching up to himself, and he goes white so fast that Eddie thinks, in alarm, of his blood pressure. "Oh, Jesus. Oh, fuck."

"Richie," Eddie starts, hearing his own voice come out plaintive and hopeful, but Richie drops the cigarette on the floor and dashes away, into the bathroom. Scrambling to pick up the still burning cigarette and get it into the ashtray before it catches something on fire, Eddie is thirty seconds too late to catch the door before it slams in his face. On the other side, he can hear Richie retching loudly. 

Eddie sighs, slamming his forehead against the door. What could he even say? If he tried _it really is me, Rich,_ the universe might drop a meteor on their heads or something, and anything else coming to mind just sounds trite and insincere. Would Richie even believe him, anyway? If he really were Timothy Beaumont, he would've left hours ago, probably. This is, objectively, a very weird experience for any person to meekly go along with. Richie has to have noticed. 

Another loud retch, from the other side of the door. _Or, maybe not,_ Eddie thinks. 

"Rich. Richie, let me in, okay? I just want to check on you," Eddie calls, knocking on the door softly. 

Richie doesn't respond for a minute, and Eddie hears the toilet flush. "Fuck off," Richie finally calls, garbled and soft through the door. Eddie's heart constricts at the sad scrape of his voice. 

"I'm not gonna do that," Eddie tells him, through the wood. He waits for a second, but Richie doesn't respond. All Eddie can hear is a soft shuffling, like Richie is rustling around on the other side of the door - and Apollo, trotting obliviously through the hallways, his collar jingling and his nails clicking on the hardwood floors. "Rich, listen to me. I'm not going anywhere. You don't have to open the door or talk or anything, but I'm gonna fucking sit right here until you make me leave. Do you hear me?"

Eddie waits. Richie doesn't say anything. 

When they were nine, Richie fell six feet out of a tree at the elementary school playground, which in retrospect was probably a lawsuit waiting to happen, had it taken place in modern day. In 1985 though, the playground monitor just gave him a band-aid and waved them back out for the rest of recess. Eddie remembers vividly sitting at the base of a slide with him as he struggled not to cry, their legs pressed up close, squeezed together by the plastic chute, just a little bit too small to share. Eddie felt strong and proud and brave, probably for the very first time, holding Richie with one arm and waving his other at the other kids, warning them away with his Outdoor Voice. _Don't touch him! His head hurts! Stay away!_

That was, Eddie remembers, what he'd wanted to do for Richie when his father died. He'd been hurt not by Richie's demeanor on the phone, but by the lack of opportunity for Eddie to put his arms around him. How sick, Eddie thinks, how twisted. It reminds him of his mother, the way she'd get all twitchy and gleeful whenever Eddie was upset, excited for the chance to take care of him. Myra was the same way, albeit in a more passive-aggressive way - she was more about the guilt trips than she was the actual "care." _I do all this for you and this is how you repay me?_ Real manipulative shit. At least Myra's more open about it, Eddie figures. It's easier to resent her, to push away the guilt that way. 

Eddie slides down against the door to the floor, putting unfamiliar hands on an unfamiliar face, trying to breathe evenly. The booze and the stress and the sunlight they'd been sitting in all afternoon, streaming in through the window, makes Eddie feel tired, sapped of energy, surreal like he's not even awake. If he broke down this door, he thinks, would Richie let him touch him then? Would he turn his body out like he had at the bar, open his arms, allow himself to be held? Would he lean down and put his head in Eddie's lap and go to sleep right there on the bedroom floor, submitting himself to Eddie's greedy heart?

No. Obviously not. Even if he knew it was Eddie, it's still not a guarantee. Richie always made a habit of darting away, the second Eddie mustered up the courage to reach out. 

Eddie tries to keep breathing, listening to Richie's matching gasps on the other side of the door. _The couple that panic attacks together stays together,_ Eddie thinks hysterically, gripping the outside of his knees so hard it hurts. 

The phone rings twice more in his pocket before Eddie calms down, but he doesn't look at it or check. Richie comes out soon after anyway, his eyes red-rimmed and his collar damp. He doesn't look Eddie in the eye. 

"You can stay if you want," he says after a long, awkward minute, looking down at Eddie on the floor with pinched eyebrows. "I don't want to fucking talk about it, though."

"Fine," Eddie says hoarsely. He reaches out a hand, asking silently for Richie to help him up. Richie looks at him like he's crazy, but takes it anyway, pulling him to his feet. "What do you want to do instead, then?"

For a second, the look on his face makes Eddie think he's going to hit on him again, but instead he says, "drink until we pass out?" which sounds like a pretty solid idea to Eddie. He nods. 

"Let's switch to something else," he says. "I hate whiskey."

"Picky," Richie mutters, but strides past him determinedly. After a second, Eddie can hear him rummaging around in the cupboards in the kitchen, Apollo barking once or twice. Eddie really hopes he has vodka. It very much feels like a moment for cheap, and possibly flavored, Smirnoff.

Feeling as if he's walking underwater, Eddie goes into the kitchen, taking the seat he was sitting in before at the counter. Richie is pouring two fresh glasses of gin - close enough - with Apollo cradled under one arm like a baby. Eddie smirks at him, but Richie doesn't smile back. 

"He likes to be held," Richie says, blank. Eddie thinks the rest of that sentence is, _and I like to hold him._ "You want me to mix this with something? I have orange juice."

"It's fine," Eddie says, reaching out. They drink in silence for a moment, watching each other warily, like a couple that's taking a break from a screaming match. Eddie is uncomfortably reminded of Myra, and sternly pushes the thought out of his mind. 

"So I think I mentioned I'm going through something," Richie finally says, after a long minute. Apollo, snuggled in his arm, twitches one of his ears.

"Me too," Eddie says honestly. 

"Hm." Richie rubs his chin against the top of Apollo's fuzzy head. He really can't be more than six or seven months, Eddie figures, with his rounded ears and stubby little tail. He wants very much for a turn to hold him too, but figures it might be impolite to ask. "Have you ever been in love, Doc?"

"What question are we on?" Eddie asks, to deflect. "Nine, ten?"

Richie shrugs, sipping silently. Not allowing Eddie to derail, in the one moment Eddie actually wants to. Typical. 

"Yes," Eddie admits, after a heavy second. "Yes, I am. Currently in love."

"Someone special?" Richie smirks half heartedly, a ghost of his normal smile. "Tattooed secretary?"

"Receptionist," Eddie corrects, listlessly. "No. Not him."

"Your wife?"

" _Fuck_ no," Eddie says. He takes a deep breath. "I don't like women either."

"Funny choice to marry one, then."

"Yes. Not funny so much as...terrible," Eddie says miserably. "Have you ever heard of, I don't know if there's a term for it. Using relationships as a way to hurt yourself?"

Richie laughs loudly, and a bit hysterically. Eddie frowns sadly at Apollo, who looks just as worried as Eddie feels. 

"Guess you have," Eddie says, after a minute during which Richie just keeps chortling darkly, not showing any sign of an actual, verbal reply. "Anyway. That's where I'm at. In case you were wondering."

"That's fucked up," Richie says blithely.

"No shit, Sherlock." Eddie grits his teeth and drinks his gin. Apollo whimpers a little, apparently squeezed a little too tight, and Richie immediately kisses his head in apology, reaching up his other arm to cradle him more gently, his laughter dying abruptly. Its absence almost leaves a ringing in Eddie's ears, like when a fire alarm cuts off. "I never got the chance to tell him," he says desolately, because if this is his only chance to say it, the only way he'll ever _get_ to say it, he'll have to live with it, he supposes. Or not live with it. Let's see where the night goes. "We were never together like that, but...maybe we could have been. If we'd had more time. But I should've said something, at least. I've always been a miserable fucking coward."

"Don't talk about yourself like that," Richie says, surprisingly. It's the closest thing to a kind sentence Eddie's heard from him so far. "It's not helpful. Believe me."

"I am though," Eddie says, discovering with some horror that he's on the verge of tears himself. "I don't remember what the last thing I said to him was. Isn't that shitty? I hope it was good, whatever it was. I hope it brought him some…" _comfort._ "Closure."

"He's still around, isn't he? Fix it," Richie suggests, with a deep, yearning sadness behind the words that makes Eddie flinch. "Nothing's so bad that you can't fix it. Flowers, chocolate, court side tickets. Whatever. There's always a chance you could get him back, especially if he's still - " he chokes on the word, and stops talking. 

_What happened?_ Eddie wants to ask. _Did It get me? How'd it happen? What did I say to you, Rich, did I tell you I loved you? Did I get to hold you, one last time?_

Richie sets Apollo down on the floor gently, his hands soft and careful around the puppy's midsection in a way that makes Eddie's stomach twist. When he straightens back up, his eyes are red again. 

"I don't know why I'm talking to you like this," he says, and he sounds so tired that Eddie finds himself reaching out, pushing his hand across the counter and then stopping himself mid-motion. Richie doesn't seem to notice. "I don't know you. I don't even know why you're here."

"You invited me here," Eddie says numbly, choking on the words he really wants to say. _You do know me. You know me._

"No, you know what I mean." Richie looks down at Apollo, who is curled up stubbornly at Richie's feet, like he can sense the high emotion in the room. He probably can, Eddie figures. Ben and Bev, he thinks, off yachting somewhere, in search for some privacy. Leaving their brand new puppy with Richie not because they needed someone to dog-sit, but because they didn't want Richie to be alone. Eddie's heart hurts. "I wish I'd been with him when he died. I wish I knew what the last thing he saw was. I came back and he was already gone. I thought - " Richie chokes on tears, reaching up with one hand to wipe them away, unashamed. For all his life, Eddie has felt embarrassed to cry in front of people. Like it was unmanly, pathetic. Richie never shared that opinion, which is something that Eddie envies. That unabashed way he felt things. "Did you ever play pretend, when you were a kid? Like acting out stories and shit with your friends?"

"Yes," Eddie says thickly. 

"We used to do that with the death scenes. You know, he'd push me in the quarry, I'd pretend to drown, then just when he started to freak out I'd come back to life and start monologuing. Drove him fucking nuts. You ever seen that Gary Cooper Hemingway flick? A Farewell to Arms? When Catherine is dying in her hospital bed after she miscarries, in that fuzzy looking nightgown and the '30s hair and everything. I musta watched that a hundred times with my old man." Richie affects an eerily good 1930's damsel voice, leaning diagonally across the counter, his eyes sparkling behind his glasses. "'Oh darling, I'm going to die. Don't let me die! Take me in your arms! Hold me tight!'"

Richie at forty, Richie at fourteen. Eddie shudders, remembering the white-hot panic of the bubbles in the water, Richie's dark head just a blur of color beneath the silt and mud. Eddie would get _so mad,_ shoving Richie back down in the dirt, strung tight by the emotional yo-yo between panic and dismay and deep, profound annoyance once Richie gave up the act and started flopping around dramatically, _I see a light, Eds! Should I go towards the light?! Are you there, Grandma?! It's me, Richie!_

"One time we did the scene from Return of the Jedi. Word for word," Richie says. "He was Luke Skywalker, obviously." _Because I was Darth Vader, obviously,_ Eddie hears. "Our friends thought it was hilarious. Because it's fucking funny, right? Two boys, holding each other. That's hilarious. Stuff of comedy legend."

"No," Eddie says hoarsely, his hand stiff around his glass. "It's not. It's not funny, Rich."

Richie doesn't even acknowledge him. "I felt kinda cheated, not gonna lie," he says hoarsely, rubbing at the tears on his chin with the back of one hand. At his feet, Apollo whines. "That I didn't get to hold him. You know, do the real thing. Touch his face, whatever. It shoulda been like the movies. Gary Cooper got to say it. You know what I mean? _I'll never stop loving you,_ " Richie says, slipping into an easy, pleasantly Hollywood drawl. "And then she says, _never? Not even if I...die?_ " Richie flutters his eyelashes, his voice going higher pitched and Southern-tinged. "And then they kiss and she still dies but hey, what a scene. They got nominated for Best Picture, you know."

"Richie," Eddie says quietly. 

"Did you know they used to make alternate endings, for the really sad movies? They'd give theatres a _choice._ Like do you want the happy ending, where Catherine survives her tragic and vaguely filmed miscarriage, and she and Lieutenant Gary ride off into the pre-Code sunset together? Or do you want this fucking shitty depressing ending, where she dies in his arms and then he has to live out the rest of his miserable alcoholic life alone? Up to you! Which one do you think the people of _your_ community will respond to?" Richie laughs, strained and manic. "Like Clue. The alternate endings, you know. You remember that flick? People argued about how it ended, because they showed different versions to different cities, just to fuck with people."

"I remember," Eddie says. 

"And there's all this shit I don't know about him. I got so many questions and nobody has the answers. All that time he was out in the world, living and breathing, and not with me. Not near me. All that time we fucking wasted." Richie hiccups, thickly, and buries his face in his glass. 

"Stolen," Eddie corrects, feeling the tears burn at the back of his own throat. "It was stolen from us."

Richie doesn't seem to hear. "And his beautiful fucking eyes, man. I can't stop thinking about them. The fucking _look_ on his face." Eddie wants to die. He thinks if he is dead, in a permanent sense, he would've preferred staying non-conscious and completely untethered, floating around in the muddy ether of whatever the fuck the afterlife has turned out to be, instead of sitting here and watching Richie say these things, with that look on his face, with his hands shaking like that. "How do you live with that? Like I'm asking you. You're a fucking therapist, you deal with people like me for a living. People ask that a lot, don't they? How. How do I do it?" Richie spreads out his hands, like he's challenging Eddie to a fight, but the tone of his voice sounds more like begging. "It can't just be time. Time doesn't fix _everything._ Some people, plenty of people, they don't get over things like this. Things not as _bad_ as this! They get a studio apartment in South LA and settle in for the long haul. Stop wearing deodorant. Get really into Reddit. So what's the difference? Between the inspirational stories, the people who get remarried a year and a half later and then make a tasteful Instagram post on the anniversary, and the Unabombers? Is it emotional maturity, money, what? You tell me, Doc."

"I don't know," Eddie stammers. "That's - that's a little out of my wheelhouse, Rich."

"Wheelhouse." Richie laughs bitterly. "You sound just like him. Who the fuck are you, man? Where did you come from?" The words come out jittery, haphazard, jumbled by the tears. "If Steve really is paying you I'm really gonna fire him this time. What a fucking joke." He doesn't sound like he thinks it's all that funny. 

"They're not paying me," Eddie says, reaching out to touch Richie's wrist, braced against the counter like he's getting ready to run. They both jump at the contact. "They're not. Richie." Eddie thinks about riding double on Richie's bike to the ice cream parlor, about spending three weeks straight in the summer of '91 knocking Richie's initials off the scoreboard on Street Fighter. The lone, tiny coffee shop on the square that opened in '93 that instantly banned them after Richie snorted a raspberry Italian Soda out of his nose. Band-aids in the glove box of his car, an extra notebook in Eddie's backpack because Richie was always forgetting his. Every man he's ever touched, every person he's ever had sex with, has been a way to or from Richie, in some way. The memories didn't go away completely, they just nestled in and hid, and Eddie's spent the last twenty-seven years looking for them and not even realizing it. 

"Kiss me," Richie says, looking Eddie in the eye. His face is so drawn and haggard, he looks like a different person. Like an old man, with deep circles beneath his eyes and lines down his face. "Make me forget."

"No," Eddie says, squeezing his wrist tight. Richie chokes on something that might be a sob. "No, not like this."

"Then do something, for fuck's sake," Richie says, itchy and stretched thin, embarrassed by his emotion, probably, but not embarrassed enough to hide the tears. "Punch me in the face! That might work."

"I'm not doing that either."

"Then what the fuck do you want?" Richie asks, exasperated. 

_What do you want, Eddie?_ He blinks, struck suddenly silent by the thought. _Well? Answer him. What the fuck do you want, Eddie Kaspbrak?_

"I want to live," he says, realizing it for the first time. Because he's not done yet, because he has stuff he wants to do. "I want to...survive this."

Richie is looking at him like he's trying to puzzle him out, again. "Yeah," he says, after a long second. His wrist flexes in Eddie's grip as he blows out a long, slow breath. "Me too."

Eddie stares down at Apollo, who has drifted over to Eddie's leg instead, at some point. His blue eyes are plaintive as he stares up at Eddie, his little tail wagging back and forth when Eddie makes eye contact. 

"Gotta say," Richie says after another strange pause, "this is the weirdest therapy session I've ever participated in. And I once had an appointment with a guy who thought playing music on water bowls could heal you from trauma."

Eddie makes a face that is at least eighty percent involuntary, and Richie laughs. "I really hope you didn't pay for that out of pocket."

"Haven't you noticed, Doc?" Richie asks, grabbing Eddie's glass for a refill. "I work in Hollywood. I pay for a lot of stupid shit."

Eddie's mother was religious for a brief time in the late 90s, which is the reason why Eddie was baptized at Christ United Methodist in Staten Island, New York, at the ripe young age of twenty. Thankfully, it was a private ceremony, held at the empty chapel on a Tuesday morning, the only attendees being Sonia and Eddie and a youth pastor who kept assuring them that it really did happen all the time, there were way more adults that never got around to it than you would think. Why, just last month they'd baptized a forty-two year old man! Just got out of prison. Saw the light inside, you know. 

Eddie remembers sitting in a metal folding chair and tilting it back against an altar, resting his head on the pastor's palm, looking up at his sunny, California boy good looks and thinking, _oh, he's hot._ His name was Charlie, Pastor Charlie, the kids called him, and he smiled at Eddie like he knew what Eddie was thinking. _I'd suck his dick if he asked,_ Eddie remembers thinking, indulging in the fantasy as warm water was trickled gently over his head, dripping down the sides of his temples and wetting his shirt collar. _What would he call me? He looks like a 'sweetheart' kind of guy. Kind of shy, maybe. Would he be into it if I wanted to push him around a little? Would he be loud or quiet? Would he call me names if I wanted him to?_

Eddie got a hard on, thinking about that, right there in front of Pastor Charlie, his mother, and God too, although Eddie's not sure the latter would've really minded, being on intimate terms with the base and sinful desires of man, and all. Isn't that why they killed Christ? To absolve for all of that, get everybody a preemptive get out of jail free card? The way Eddie saw it, that meant he had a bit of leeway when it came to the occasional carnal thought or desire. It was the least God could do, considering He was the one who gave Eddie a dick in the first place. 

If pressed, Eddie would've said that he was spiritual but not religious, that he believed in a higher power but he wasn't all that fussed about the name or denomination or the personality. Myra was raised Catholic, but Eddie doesn't think she's stepped foot in a church in over a decade, probably, excepting her second cousin's funeral, which they slipped out of early after the opening hymns anyway. Richie was Jewish in the sense that his mother was, but he himself was fundamentally incompatible, like as a human being, with religion as a concept. He once told Eddie that his mom tried to take him and his dad to synagogue once but both of them ate too much whipped cream on their pancakes the same morning and ended up puking, in tandem, in the parking lot while Maggie Tozier attended the service on her own and pretended she didn't know them. 

It would be really fucking funny, Eddie notes absently, if that baptism were the reason Eddie is here. Not that he remembers much about this in the Bible, whatever it is. Reincarnation? Does it count as reincarnation when you get drop kicked into a life already in progress?

Eddie's phone wakes him up, the next morning. He was exiled to the couch, around eleven, if he remembers correctly, as Richie shuffled into his bedroom with a gigantic bottle of water in one hand and Apollo in the other. _Don't rob me, okay? Pinky swear._ They'd made it an impressive stretch of time, considering their age and the amount of alcohol imbibed, but Eddie still doesn't remember the last hour or so. He thinks Richie might've hit on him again, invited him into the bedroom maybe, but maybe that's wishful thinking. He's so hungover he can't think straight. 

There are now nine missed calls, on the phone. Dry mouthed, Eddie fumbles the phone into the couch - how it even still has battery is a miracle - and shuffles into the kitchen for water. Apollo's dog food is sitting there on the counter, the lid half-opened, and the bowl left dirty on the floor, streaked with the leftovers of Apollo's dinner the night before. Irritated, headachey, and searching fruitlessly for aspirin, Eddie downs three glasses of water in a row and then washes the food bowl, muttering under his breath. 

There's a letter on the fridge, crinkled at the edges, like it's gotten wet and then dried again. Eddie's eyes catch on it and his stomach lurches; it's Stan's handwriting. 

Richie finds him there, on the kitchen floor, clutching the letter with both hands. Eddie doesn't have a single clue how long it's been, how long he's been sitting there, reading it. It feels like barely even a second, but also like it's been hours. 

"Hi," Richie says, apprehensively. He's squinting at Eddie like he can't quite believe he's there, holding a squirming Apollo, a robe wrapped around his shoulders. Eddie blinks up at him dumbly, feeling the tears that have dried on his face wrinkling his skin like a sunburn. "Uh. That's mine."

"Yeah," Eddie says, for lack of anything better. Any explanation at all, really. He's got nothing. "I read it."

"Got to you, huh?" Richie says. He doesn't seem mad, exactly. He definitely looks hungover, too. "I, uh. Are you okay, man?"

"No," Eddie says honestly. 

"Alright." Apollo barks twice, sharply, and Richie startles, tearing his eyes away from Eddie's hands, clutching the letter. "I gotta take him out."

"Okay," Eddie says blankly, wiping his face. He lurches to his feet slowly, carefully pinning the letter back into place against the fridge. It's a photocopy, Eddie has realized belatedly, and wonders what that means, that Richie put the real version away somewhere safe but kept the words up on his fridge, in his face all the time. "I'll come with you."

"Uh, you don't have to," Richie says, obviously still at a loss for how to deal with this deeply weird, emotional man who has not sneaked out of his apartment before he woke up, like a polite non-one night stand would do. Well, fuck him, Eddie thinks. He can just deal with it. "There's like, coffee. And stuff. In here. You can make whatever you want."

"Do you even have a leash for him?" Eddie demands. Richie's face goes slack with surprise again. "You can't take him out with a collar, at the very least. Haven't you ever heard of leash laws?"

Richie seems to struggle with himself for a long, painful moment, before he deliberately turns away on one heel in a quick, surprisingly elegant motion. "I really need some fucking aspirin, man."

"Well, join the club!" Eddie says furiously. Richie flinches like he's been hit. 

The walk around the block is quiet, subdued, a weird energy in the air that makes Eddie feel like fidgeting. He'll tell Richie today, he decides. He has to. He can't just let the situation languish forever - if they are going to figure this out, they need Mike, and obviously Mike's not going to believe Eddie's vague, threatening emails without testimony from Richie. If Eddie can get through this one, singularly important sentence without a piano dropping on his head, that is. And if Richie believes him. 

"I had a friend," Eddie says, as they round the corner back to the apartment building. Richie, intensely focused on Apollo up to this point - he actually did have a collar and a leash in the closet, but Eddie has not apologized - jumps in surprise. "He killed himself recently."

"Oh," Richie says. He doesn't say anything else, just rubs his face wearily. Eddie stares at the side of his face, waiting for something - he doesn't know what - but the tired lines in Richie's forehead just make him feel sad. 

"Your friend. He did too?"

"Yeah," Richie says heavily. "Not the same friend. As, uh. Last night." He stutters a little on the word 'friend.' "Two friends, in one week. Talk about a record."

"Shit," Eddie says, still stuck on the mental image of Stanley, writing out those letters before he climbed the stairs to his bathroom. _Dear Losers,_ he'd written. He'd sent them to everyone, that implies. 

Was there a letter waiting for Eddie, back in New York? Was it sitting in a pile of mail that Myra shoved into a drawer somewhere? Or did she shred it out of anger, still thinking that Eddie had left her? Did it say the same thing as Richie's, or did he include something just for Eddie? It's selfish to hope so, Eddie thinks. 

"I talk to his widow sometimes," Richie says. He laughs bleakly. "Weird thing to say. 'Widow.'"

Eddie closes his eyes, painfully. 

"Bill talks to her more than I do. That's another friend of mine. The novels," Richie says, inclining his head. "I saw you looking at them."

"I've read a few of them," Eddie says hoarsely. 

"Yeah. He's written a lot." Richie tugs morosely on Apollo's leash, gently pulling him away from somebody's wilted-looking hydrangea bush. "They had a way of talking to each other, Bill and Stan. Something the rest of us didn't get."

 _Like us,_ Eddie thinks. Well - maybe not _exactly_ like them. But close enough. 

"Are you gonna get that?"

Eddie startles. "What?"

Richie nods at the phone in Eddie's hand, which is ringing, Eddie realizes. "Somebody must really want to get ahold of you," he says. "That's the third time it's gone off since we left the apartment."

Eddie curses, looking at the screen. The number isn't saved. "I didn't hear it."

Richie shrugs. "I won't eavesdrop," he says, and pulls Apollo further down the sidewalk, directing him to a sunny patch of grass next to a mailbox. Eddie takes the hint. 

"Hello?"

"Hello!" A cheerful, perky voice. Eddie flinches physically. "This is Mattie from Dr. Hester's office. How are you this morning, Mr. Beaumont?"

"Are you serious?" Eddie asks. "What could you possibly want now?" He pulls his phone away from his face, glancing at the notifications at the top of the screen. "Have you seriously been calling me since last night?"

"Well, we needed to get in touch with you regarding an urgent matter related to your appointment," Mattie says. "It's somewhat sensitive, you understand."

"What the fuck could you possibly need to talk to me about? You're a dentist's office," Eddie says incredulously. "My appointment's not until tomorrow, isn't it? Can't we talk then?"

"I'm afraid not," Mattie says. There's an odd sort of hissing noise, on her side of the line, and it almost sounds like she's calling from somewhere _outside._ Eddie can hear the loud sound of crickets, and that fuzzy, outdoor white noise that creeps in on hot summer nights, wrapping you up on your friend's mom's back porch, eating Popsicles as you wait for your mom to come pick you up. The hot summer morning has fallen away, frozen on the other side of some barrier that Eddie can't see, but he can feel it, pressing down against his sinuses, like a pressure change. Richie is right there, but he's not. He's standing a few feet away, and a few decades away, all at the same time. "I'm sad to say that our timetable has moved up a bit, due to some unforeseen circumstances, and we need you to make a decision. Are you ready?"

"Ready?" Eddie repeats blankly. He feels oddly stuck, like he's standing in a foot of mud, his body held immobile by sticky, cloying heat. Richie suddenly looks like he's very far away, on the other side of a heat wave, or perhaps a curtain of water. Eddie feels a spike of sharp fear. "What do you want? Who is this?"

"I told you already, my name is Mattie," she says, laughing like he's made a joke. "I am your friend, you know. There's no need to feel afraid."

Eddie does feel afraid, though. He's been afraid since the day he was born. 

"I'm sure _that's_ not true," Mattie says, clucking her tongue. Eddie stares at Richie's back, the image wavering a little. _Turn around,_ he thinks desperately, a frenzied sense of panic seizing him. _Turn around, please. Let me look at you one last time._ "Please, Mr. Kaspbrak. Try to stay calm. Remember that I'm your friend. You did me a favor - do you remember? Try to think. I whispered in your ear, and you passed my message on to your friends. Do you remember my voice?"

"I don't, I," Eddie says, his head pounding. _Make it small,_ he remembers suddenly. A tiny fission of thought, worming its way through Eddie's skull and out of his mouth, a voice that felt old and young and male and female all at once. _Make him feel the things he makes you feel._

"You remember," Mattie says gently, sounding satisfied. Eddie feels like crying, just a little. He thinks about his baptism, wonders if she is who Pastor Charlie was referring to when he said _Holy Ghost._ "Not quite a ghost," she answers, without bothering to wait for Eddie to ask. "Not quite a God, either. It all depends on how you look at it." She hums a little, warm and friendly over the line, and it also sounds like a hiss. The sound of the woods at night swells, until it's all Eddie can hear. "Are you afraid? Not so much anymore, huh? That's good. It's decision time, Eddie."

"Decision?" Eddie repeats, overwhelmed at the thought. He can still see Richie, kind of. Apollo is taking a shit, which is just typical. Absolutely fucking typical, if that's the last thing Eddie gets to see of this life, a puppy shitting on a flowerbed and Richie jumping around and cursing, rummaging through his pockets for a poop bag. "What decision?"

"You know what decision," Mattie says kindly. "I gave you as much time as I could. I would give you more, if Stanley hadn't made his choice so quickly."

"Stan," Eddie repeats thickly. His brain feels like it's been soaked in molasses. "Jesus. Did you - " The thought of Stan waking up in a stranger's body is absolutely hysterical - just wildly funny, in a deeply surreal way. "Is this like, an a la carte service you offer to victims of supernatural clowns? You get to say goodbye or something, yanked into the body of the love of your life's grief therapist?"

"Actually, he ended up in her brother," Mattie says. "Sort of awkward, I know. I don't control everything."

Eddie sputters, not knowing whether to laugh, or yell. It's a familiar sensation. 

"So?" Mattie asks warmly. Eddie feels a weird, vertigo sensation of being pulled in several directions all at once, all the while standing very still. "Tell me. I'm listening."

"I mean obviously I don't want to fucking die," Eddie snaps.

"That's not the decision I mean," Mattie replies, with another absurd laugh. "Come on. You know what I'm talking about."

Does he? He does. Eddie thinks about Richie at seventeen, leaning his cheek against Eddie's knee. _I'll die if I forget you, Eds. I swear to God I'll fucking die._ "You...you can do that?"

"I can do a lot of things," Mattie says. "Some good, some bad. Some that help, some that don't. I like it best when I can help." 

Eddie gasps for air, breathing in air that's thick with humidity and moisture. Swamp air. He can hear water running. "I want to live," he says. "That's all I know, I swear to God. I just know I want to be here."

"Obviously you're going to live," Mattie says, as if it really is that simple. "But how, Eddie? Where do you want to start?"

Eddie thinks about it, staring at Richie from a hundred miles away, wiping his shoes on the grass and cradling the puppy protectively, curling his big body around him like a mother bear. He thinks about it. Could he do it that way? Could he go back to that night a million years ago and grab him tight and keep him close, hold him like he's always wanted. Could he even - would it even be - could Eddie survive it if - 

_"Luke," Richie said, his face lit up with suppressed delight, like he couldn't wait to get this all over with so he could laugh again, "help me take...this mask off."_

_"But you'll die," Eddie said, hearing Mike's snickers floating over from the fallen log where they were all sitting. Ben was cheering them on silently, a piece of notebook paper in his lap where he'd written CUT and ACTION on either side._

_"Nothing...can stop that now," Richie said, yukking it up for the audience, his Darth Vader heavy breathing and Voice a little over the top but passably good, at least according to Mike and Stan and Ben's estimations. Eddie felt hot all over, cradling Richie in his lap like that. Richie's head was heavy, sweaty-wet against the crook of Eddie's elbow, but he didn't feel like moving. Eddie would sit there all night if Richie would stay too, he'd sit there until his legs got pins and needles and had to be amputated for lack of proper blood flow. "Just for once, let me...look on you...with my _own_ eyes." Richie reached up and touched Eddie's face, for dramatic effect, and Eddie felt like he was the one dying, just a little. _

_"And here's the part where we really feel the lack of a Props department," Stan said._

_"Oh, here!" Mike cried, picking up an old football helmet that they'd been using to collect rocks in. He shook out the dirt and debris and tossed it over to Richie, who reached out and plunked it on his head without a single hesitation._

_"Oh my God, Trashmouth, are you crazy? You're going to get Hepatitis B," Eddie cried._

_"From a helmet?" Richie asked, jittering with laughter in Eddie's arms. "Can you catch diseases through your head? Fellas, can we get a fact check?"_

_Eddie flushed red at the lightning round of teasing that ensued, or maybe that was Richie's lower back, which kept brushing against Eddie's thigh every time he moved. Hard to tell._

_"Come on, get on with the show," Stan jeered, throwing a few loose pieces of grass in their direction. They fluttered to the ground uselessly, not even making it a full foot away. "I wanna see what happens. What kinda movie is this, anyway?"_

_"One of them space movies," Mike said, in a very funny rendition of Richie's southern belle Voice. "With the swords."_

_"Oh, right, the swords," Ben chimed in. "Oh hey, you guys should do the Emperor fight scene. We can use the swords we made in shop class."_

_"Nobody's getting near me with one of those fucking things," Stan swore._

_"Next time," Richie promised. "Eds come on, I'm dying. Take my fucking mask off."_

_For some reason, Eddie felt close to tears as he followed directions, lifting the dirty helmet off of Richie's head with a grimace, touching it gingerly to avoid the grossest spots. He could hear the others snickering at him, but he didn't care. Richie was looking up at him, his eyes wide, and Eddie didn't care._

_"Now," Richie said, with every ounce of drama in his weird little soul, "go, my son. Leave me."_

_Eddie touched his shoulder. It wasn't very hard to look sad. "No. You're coming with me. I won't leave you here - I've got to save you!"_

_"You already have," Richie said. Somewhere beyond them, Ben was waving his hands in his air, imitating a swoon. Stan was laughing, pink-faced, his hands in his hair, and Mike was just watching. Waiting to see the ending._

_"Luuuke," Richie whispered, grabbing Eddie's collar and pulling him down a little. Eddie stopped breathing. "You were right about me. Tell…" he gasped, flopping dramatically against Eddie's chest. "Tell your sister….you were right…."_

_Eddie had to choke back laughter of his own, at the choking, flailing death that Richie then put on for their benefit, complete with several more gasps, chokes, and his grabby hands, stretching out the elastic of Eddie's collar. His mom was gonna kill him if he came home with another ruined shirt, Eddie knew. He didn't care about that either._

_"Bravo!" Ben called, cupping his hands around his mouth and hissing, to make an audience noise. "Encore, encore!"_

_Stan had snatched the notebook paper and was walking back and forth with the CUT side out. "Clear the set, clear the set! That's a wrap, folks!"_

_"That was beautiful, guys," Mike said, standing up from the log and brushing off his jeans. He brushed away a fake tear, too. "Just beautiful."_

_"Didja hear that, Eddie? He thinks we're bee-yoo-tiful," Richie said, pulling Eddie down by his ears and pressing their faces together like they were posing for a picture. For a heartstopping second, Eddie thought he was going in for a kiss - not that Richie would kiss him - not that Eddie would kiss Richie - not that he THOUGHT about that ever - fuck you! Eddie shoved his cheek away with a scowl. "We're destined for Hollywood! Call your ma, Eds, tell her we're gonna be famous!"_

_"Pictures?" Stan scoffed, grinning the way he did only when Richie was around. "You got a face made for radio, Trashmouth."_

_"Ouch!" Richie mimed getting shot again, collapsing back into Eddie's arms. Eddie pretended not to care, grunting and kneeing Richie in the kidneys, hoping he wouldn't get up. He didn't, he just flopped down and stayed there, and Eddie's cheeks felt hot, prickly all over where Richie had touched him. "You're all so fucking mean to me, and after I just died, too."_

_"Nothing can kill you, Richie," Mike said fondly. "You'll outlive us all."_

_Eddie frowned, at that._

_"Yeah, like a cockroach," Stan said, and Richie laughed wildly, delighted._

_"Hey Stan, have you heard the one about the three cockroaches and the dirty lady?" he said. All four of them groaned, in unison. "Okay, twist my arm, I'll tell it. So these three roaches, see, they live on this lady who never showers, and - "_

_"You started this," Mike said to Stan, gravely. Eddie frowned some more._

_" - they all get together at her belly button, you know to shoot the shit. And the first cockroach says - no, don't leave, Stan, you'll miss the punchline! Ben, quick, grab him - "_

"What did Stanley choose?" Eddie asks. He can't remember the punchline. Not that he wants to. It was almost definitely one of the most disgusting jokes Richie ever told, so Eddie doesn't feel like he really needs the knowledge of how it ended in his brain. 

"Well, he certainly didn't wait around to hear the end of that joke either," Mattie says lightly. Eddie blinks down at his hands, which also feel very far away. And also feel like his real hands, for once. His head really hurts. "But that's not how it works. This is your life, not his. He did what he did, now you have to do what you're going to do."

Eddie wants to ask how it would work, but there's a cliff breaking inside of his head, like half of his life is crumbling away before his eyes, falling into a cool, blue ocean. He can still see Richie, walking slowly down the sidewalk towards him, his tall, angled shoulders and his messy, hangover hair. Eddie thinks about being thirteen again, being the same height as him. Thinks about leaning on his back as they waited in the lunch line at school, complaining about his too-tight shoes. Richie never flinched. He didn't even flinch last night, when he didn't even know it was Eddie. 

"Hm," Mattie says. Eddie hadn't said anything, but that doesn't seem to matter. 

They would be very different people now, if they'd remembered. If Eddie went back, and made a different decision - who's to say it would be better? That he could change anything at all, make their lives perfect? Getting all that stolen time back, at the cost of the loss of the people they are _now?_ Would it be worth it? He doesn't fucking know. What he does know is this: Richie's five feet away from him, standing in the real world, holding Ben and Beverly's puppy. He hasn't brushed his teeth yet this morning which is objectively disgusting. He drinks too much, and he's sad all the time. He needs someone to take care of him, and not in the way that Eddie's mother took care of him - he needs somebody to laugh at his jokes and yell at him about vitamins. He needs a person, standing next to him in the line at the grocery store. He'd said Eddie's name in his sleep last night, which is knowledge that Eddie didn't have before but he has now, and Eddie wants to stay. That's his decision. This is where he is, for better or worse, and he wants it. 

"Hm," Mattie says, sounding like she approves. Something deep and tender curls in Eddie's chest, like pride. "Well, alright then. If that's what you want."

Oh, it's that easy? Eddie feels sort of mad about it, in a fond way. Just that simple? "That's it?"

"Yeah, that's it," Mattie says. Eddie can already hear the sounds of the woods retreating, Mattie's voice deepening back to a much more normal, human, receptionist-on-the-phone register. "Okay, that's good. That'll make it even. Thanks for your time, Eddie. You know - I really do appreciate it. Everything you kids have done. Letting me help, you know - it's so nice, when you let me."

"You help other people?" Eddie thinks. Other strangers, or other Eddies? He gets the sense that he's not supposed to know. "Wait - I mean, how does this work, am I just going to - do I get my body back, or what - "

Mattie hums again. "Sure. If you want it."

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

Mattie laughs. "Don't worry," she says. "All in good time."

Eddie blinks, and then the world is normal again. He's just a middle aged idiot on a cell phone, standing in the middle of the sidewalk like a douche, and the love of his life is staring at him like he's a lunatic. "Well, do I still have to go to my teeth cleaning appointment?"

Mattie laughs, a clear, tinkling bell of a sound. "Do your teeth really need cleaning?"

Eddie pokes around with his tongue, a little. "I guess not. At least, I don't think so."

"Then I guess you answered your own question, huh?" she says. She doesn't speak again. 

He's still in Timothy Beaumont's body, which is a huge fucking bummer. Eddie avoids thinking about it until they shuffle back to the apartment, at which point he plops his ass on the couch and starts some breathing exercises, to ward off the panic attack. 

"Uh," Richie says, leaning down to set Apollo on the floor. The dog instantly darts over to Eddie's side and starts licking his ankle. "Do you need a Xanax or something?"

"No," Eddie wheezes. He gives him the stink eye, as best as he's able, considering his current state. "Idiot."

Richie holds up both hands, and then disappears into the kitchen. Eddie stares at the spot where he'd just been standing for a few seconds, incredulous, before Richie appears again with a glass of water in hand. Eddie rolls his eyes, both at himself and at Richie. 

"I don't need that."

"Yes, you do," Richie says, kneeling at his side. He presses it carefully into Eddie's hand, using both of his to curl his fingers around the cup, and Eddie shivers. He doesn't fucking need this right now. His hands, with the wide palms and everything - bullshit. Total bullshit. "Drink it slow. And just breathe normally. The deep in and out thing you're doing is making it worse."

"Bullshit," Eddie says, just to say something, but he sips at the water a little and it does make him feel better, so there's that. 

"Been through one or two of these in my time," Richie says. "Or a hundred. Whatever. Oh, shit." He pulls out his own phone from the pocket of his robe, which had been rattling a little, pressed up against the wooden leg of the couch. "Oh, this is my friend Mike. I should take this. You good? You feeling better?"

Eddie's gone tense, rigidly stiff against the cushion. "Yeah. Just need a minute."

"Okay." Richie stands, already distracted, but his hand trails up Eddie's shoulder absently. An affectionate little rub of his thumb, as he pulls away. Eddie shudders hard beneath it, feeling it all the way down to his toes. "Hey, Mikey! Did you get my - oh. Oh, uh huh. No, yeah, I'm at home. Why, what's up? You sound really weird, man, did something happen?"

Eddie watches him wander off, onto the balcony, his shoulders tight. He thinks, suddenly, of the last message he'd sent last night, a few drinks into the day, which had definitely mentioned blowjobs. Motherfuck. He really is a moron, sometimes. 

It's like waiting for the judge to hand down a life sentence, Eddie thinks, watching intently through the gap in the curtain as Richie takes this particular phone call. He keeps pacing back and forth on the balcony, his robe swishing around his thighs as he talks. A few times he stops short, and exclaims something loudly, too muffled through the thick glass door for Eddie to hear. Eddie sits there, grimly drinks his water, and waits for it. 

Apollo nudges at his shin, and Eddie reaches down and scoops him up. Fuck it, he thinks, as Apollo snuggles into the corner of Eddie's chest. There's a bright, burning spot right at the midpoint of his sternum, like the skin has been scraped raw, or he's gotten a nasty sunburn. Apollo seems fascinated with that very spot, nudging his nose against Eddie's chest and snuffling cutely, licking his shirt and pawing gently at it from the circle of Eddie's hand. 

"Nice to meet you too," Eddie says softly. Apollo tilts his head at him, looking curious. "I'm Eddie Kaspbrak. What's your name?"

He tenses, and waits. No meteors, no phone calls, no pianos falling from the sky. Well, that's as close to a confirmation as he's ever gonna get, Eddie figures. 

Richie yells something loudly, sounding distressed and almost frantic, and Eddie closes his eyes. This is it, he thinks, squeezing Apollo a little tighter. 

He stumbles back in, in the next second, the phone still pressed tightly to his ear. His robe is twisted up around his body, and his eyes are wild, staring at Eddie with one hand white-knuckled on the balcony door, bright and shiny in his face. Eddie gulps. 

"Yeah, he's right here," Richie says, after a long beat of silence. "I don't fucking know, Mike, I don't know, okay? Two minutes ago he looked - "

"Rich," Eddie says, and Richie startles so bad he almost trips over the door jam.

"Fuck. Fuck!" Richie exclaims, practically throwing the phone across the room. It clatters to the ground loudly, halfway between them on the floor. Eddie stares at it, the call still active, the little phone icon and MIKE HANLON, in bold across the screen. 

"Uh," Eddie says, squeezing Apollo a little tighter. The puppy wiggles. "Rich, are you - "

"He wants to talk to you," Richie says, still staring at Eddie's face, looking like he's seen a ghost. He blinks in the next second, rubbing his palms over his face. "Your hair was blond. Right? Literally five fucking minutes ago, before I went outside, your hair was blond."

"Is it not blond now?" Eddie asks curiously, reaching one hand up to his head. Richie chokes loudly. 

"Just pick up the fucking phone, man," Richie says, sounding like he's about to lose it. Eddie looks at him, then at the phone, and then carefully rises from the couch. Richie tenses, and watches him warily the whole time, braced against the door like he thinks Eddie's about to attack him, or something. "Just talk to him. I'm gonna sit right here while you talk, and just - just, yeah. Holy fuck."

"Okay," Eddie says, soothingly. He sets Apollo on the ground. "Do you want to hold the dog?"

Apollo makes that decision for the both of them, seemingly, immediately darting to Richie's side, hitching his paws up on Richie's shin. Richie stares down at him with wet eyes, then picks him up and holds him beneath his chin, his hands shaking. 

Mike is crying, when Eddie brings the phone to his ear. It's weird - Eddie doesn't know that he ever considered the possibility that Mike would ever cry. Not even when his parents died, did Eddie ever see him cry. He just got quiet and sad and tense, and hugged them a lot more. "Eddie? Oh Jesus, oh God. Eddie, is it you?"

"Hey, Mikey," Eddie says, watching Richie carefully. He's rocking back and forth, his eyes closed, the whining dog pressed to his chest. "Sorry about the emails. I got a little frustrated."

Mike makes a weird, distressed noise, like he's choking. Eddie instantly feels guilty about it. "Oh my God. Oh my _God._ "

"I'm not sure, like - Richie said my hair changed," Eddie says. Richie twitches. "Mike, I'm not really sure what's happening. I talked to this girl, she was, um - I dunno. Are you still in Denver?"

Mike chokes on a laugh. "I'm getting a flight right now."

"Oh, you don't have to do that. Don't go to any trouble or anything," Eddie says. 

"Are you - oh my God," Mike says again, like a broken record. "Are you for real, man? Of course I'm coming. Shut up."

Eddie laughs, incredulous and pleased and overwhelmed, and full of love. So full of love. 

"Rich said you don't look like yourself," Mike says. "Is that why you didn't tell him? You didn't think he'd believe you?"

"I couldn't tell him," Eddie says. Richie's eyes fly open, and when their eyes meet, it's like seeing him for the first time, in a weird way. Like the first day they'd met, spring of '83, on the lawn outside the elementary school. Richie shared his granola bar with Eddie, and they played jacks together during free reading time. "Like I literally… _couldn't._ I couldn't say the words. I could type them, but I couldn't say them out loud."

"Okay, okay," Mike says, still sounding choked up, crying audibly as he speaks. "That's - okay. We should talk about this in person, Eddie, oh my God. I can't believe - you were - "

"Yeah," Eddie says, before Mike can say it. "Let's talk about it in person, Mike. It's okay."

Mike takes a deep breath. "Eddie."

"Yeah," Eddie says. His knees feel a little wobbly, so he sits down right there in the middle of the floor. Richie blinks at him, in distress, and then copies his motion, sliding down against the wall and matching his position, Apollo still cradled in his arms. "Hey. I love you, man."

"I love you too," Mike says, openly crying. "Fuck, Eds. We love you. We missed you so fucking much. I'm so sorry, man, I'm so - "

"Hey, don't do that," Eddie says gently. "Don't. It's okay. Just come see me, Mikey. We can talk about all of it in person."

"Okay," Mike says, raw and wobbly, "okay. I'll - yeah. Okay."

Eddie talks to him gently for a few minutes more, watching Richie the whole time. Richie stares back at him, not even blinking all that often, like he's not even awake. Eddie hangs up the phone, feeling vulnerable and a little scared, and more than a little worried about his hair, which Richie keeps looking at. His face is still Timothy Beaumont's, right? His hands are the same, he can see that. And his fucking dick is probably still the same size. Son of a bitch. 

"Richie," Eddie says, cautious, after a long second. Richie takes a long, deep breath that sounds painful. More like a wheeze. 

"I - uh," Richie says, still staring at him with wide, wide eyes. "Your nose."

"My nose?" Eddie touches it, in case it's gone missing. Nope, still there.

"It's - it looks different too. I just noticed." Richie blinks. "Am I dreaming? Like am I fucking dreaming? I lost it, right? I'm a white room somewhere?"

"No," Eddie says. "Not unless I lost it too, which...is a real possibility, I guess."

"Comforting," Richie says, strangled. 

They stare at each other some more. 

"Um," Eddie says, reaching up to touch his face. His cheeks, the day-old stubble. It still feels like Timothy Beaumont, but the low-grade panicky feeling is mostly gone now. He feels...more at home, almost. Like it belongs to him, in a way it didn't, before. "Nothing else is different, right? I didn't suddenly grow face tattoos or anything?"

"Uh," Richie says, with a hysterical burst of laughter. "No."

"And you, you know what's happening. Right, Rich?" Eddie asks tentatively. "You know...who I am, Mike told you…"

"I don't know who you are," Richie blurts, looking panicked and stricken and like he's on the edge of a serious freak out, his face a pale, sickly white. "You're a fucking...grief therapist, for fuck's sake, I just met you yesterday."

"Okay," Eddie says cautiously. 

"If you are who you told Mike you are, that would be fucked up and crazy, I mean," Richie rambles, high pitched, squeezing Apollo tightly. The dog just shimmies a little, licking Richie's chin. "You're - you're not him. Obviously. You don't look anything like him. Your hair, that's just - I must've - I don't know," he trails off momentarily, flustered. "I can't - you're not - this is just, holy fuck. I'm crazy. I'm fucking crazy." He slams his forehead into his palm, frantic. 

"Okay, okay," Eddie says quickly, heartsick. "Take it easy. We don't have to - we don't have to admit it out loud yet, it's fine. We can just...sit here for a while. Is that okay?"

Richie mutters something inaudible, staring at Eddie's feet on the floor. When he lifts his face up again, his skin is blotchy, streaked with red. 

"Okay, let's just sit here," Eddie repeats, to keep himself calm as much as Richie, at this point. "You know, I - that guy I told you about. My best friend. I missed him when I didn't remember him. It's nice to just, to sit here with you, Rich - it's just nice. You know what I mean? To find someone you can just sit with side by side, and not talk? That's amazing. I don't think I've ever had that with anyone but him."

"You're talking a lot right now," Richie says, choked with tears. "You always talk a lot. I couldn't fucking believe it, when you first opened your mouth, it was so - " he chokes again, and stops talking. 

"I didn't think I fooled you, even for a second," Eddie says fondly. There's wetness on his face, he reaches up and feels it, presses his palm against his cheek. 

"I - " Richie buries his face in Apollo's fur, who whines a little, but stays still. "Eddie," he mutters after a second, barely audible. Eddie's heart leaps. "Eds. His - his name was Eddie and I called him Eds."

"I know," Eddie says, laughing shakily. He feels like he might burst into pieces right there. "Yeah, I know."

Richie shakes, curled up on the floor, and doesn't say anything. Eddie crawls closer, bit by bit, watching him all the while for a reaction, and finally lays one hand on his ankle, tentatively. Richie makes a loud, hurt noise, and then stops, freezing beneath Eddie's touch, his whole body growing still. Eddie squeezes his ankle, and thinks, _oh. Oh, I know what Stanley chose._

"I'm gonna lose it, man," Richie mutters, after a while. Apollo wiggles in his grip, and Richie finally lets him go. The puppy twirls around them in a burst of energy, wiggling his little tail and scratching his nails against the floor. "I'm gonna fucking lose it. What the fuck. Are you sure I'm awake?"

Eddie pinches him, and Richie yelps. "Do you feel awake?"

"Oh, fuck you," Richie says, and then his face blanches again, shifting between shock and dismay and something much, much more complicated. Eddie waits him out, his heart in his throat. 

"Yeah, that's what I thought," Eddie says, smoothing his palm over the spot he'd just pinched. Richie's face twists in response, and his leg twitches, like he wants to pull away. He doesn't. "I'm awake too, I think."

"Shit," Richie mutters, burying his face in his shaking palms again. "Holy _shit._ "

"Yeah, tell me about it," Eddie says. 

It takes, all in all, about six months for Eddie to look like himself again. This is a very funny process, also. Eddie spends a lot of time stretching, and staring at himself in the mirror. It doesn't feel particularly healthy, but whatever. 

He hasn't seen Richie in four of those months. This is mostly because the minute Ben and Beverly were called, they both absolutely lost their minds, Bev sobbing for almost twenty minutes on Skype, getting herself together just in time to lose it again the second she heard his voice, or saw his face. In the face of that, Eddie _had_ to go stay with them. The desperate way they'd asked - Ben valiantly trying to be casual, Bev, red-eyed behind his shoulder, her hands wringing - pretty much demanded it. 

Anyway, there's been a lot of crying. As soon as they got through Ben and Bev then there was Bill, who burst into tears so violent that Eddie recoiled on instinct, alarmed - and then Mike, who grabbed Eddie by the shoulders and refused to let go for almost an hour. Eddie remembers little things, vaguely, here and there, and one of the most vivid sensations is Beverly screaming in horror. She'd screamed when it happened, he's pretty sure. He remembers Ben yelling, too, so loud his voice cracked. He remembers hearing Bill's voice, from somewhere off in the distance, over Richie's shoulder as he pressed his jacket to Eddie's - to Eddie's something. It's still fuzzy. But whatever, it's not like Eddie wants all the details. Nobody is particularly ready to talk about it yet.

They live on a boat. Eddie's adjusting to that, along with the stretches, and the slowly morphing face, shifting from Timothy Beaumont back to Eddie Kaspbrak, bit by painful bit. It's sort of like going through puberty all over again. 

Mike lives in Denver full time now, for some reason (terrible city. Eddie's only been to the airport but just on that airport alone, he feels comfortable making that assertion) but he's spent most of these past six months at Richie's, which Eddie knows because they get status updates from him every day. Every morning, as Ben scrambles eggs or blends smoothies, Eddie and Bev crowd in around the little kitchenette counter and read Mike's morning email out loud: _he's doing a little better. Still having panic attacks but the new meds are working for him a little better. He says hi, Eddie. We're not quite to the point where he's using your name out loud, but I think he's gotten a little more comfortable talking about you. Still having nightmares of course, but isn't everybody? And hey, Apollo's toilet training is going great. Love you guys._

Bev started taking photos around month two, to document it, or something, but then when Eddie looked at them, scrolling through the album on her phone, he got so creeped out he shoved the phone away so violently Bev grabbed his arm in alarm. 

"Sorry, I just - sorry," Eddie says. "It's still - " 

His voice had come back by then, as well as his dick (thank God). He was still a little shorter than he was before, which really chaps his fucking ass. His face is mostly his, now. But it still hits him, sometimes. 

"Yeah, okay, no worries," Bev says, swiping the album away. "Say the word and they're gone. Woosh. Deleted."

"No, you can keep them, we might need them someday," Eddie says, thinking about Stan. He hasn't told them about that, yet. Not because he doesn't want them to know, but because he himself is afraid to call and check, and discover that he's wrong. None of them have mentioned talking to Patty recently, but they've all been a little distracted, to say the least. 

"You don't want to look at them," Bev concludes. They all keep staring at him now, like he's going to disappear the second they blink too long. Bev, in particular, looks somewhat forlorn sometimes, having been the one to so closely track Eddie's metamorphosis from Timothy Beaumont to Eddie, again. Eddie, once more. "Got it."

"Bev," Eddie says, reaching out for her hand, "do you believe in God?"

"Lately?" Bev smiles, wobbly. "Maybe. I don't know. Jury's out."

"Yeah," Eddie says, laughing. "Same."

"I think if God exists, He or She is probably not named God," Bev says thoughtfully, squeezing his hand absently. Sometimes Eddie is hit with it all over again - the overwhelming gratitude that he's here, living and breathing, willing and able to hold Beverly Marsh's hand and idly discuss the universe. He breathes in and out slowly and deeply, listening to her. "I think if They are out there looking out for us, then They're probably in some sort of...form, or shape, that we can't fully comprehend."

Eddie remembers a phone call, but that's all he remembers. A vague sense of having discussed this with somebody who annoyed him, but if that person was God, then Eddie had been deeply unimpressed. "Like angels in the Bible," he says. "With the, you know. The eight eyes and three heads, or whatever. They were supposed to be beyond human perception, so overwhelming to see in person that it drove us mad."

"Three heads?" Bev wrinkles her nose. "Creepy. Also sort of convenient, from a storytelling perspective."

"No kidding," Eddie says. 

The weirdest part, Eddie thinks, as he shuffles around Ben and Beverly's boat in his loose yoga pants - the only garment that doesn't make Eddie's still-morphing muscles ache, go figure - is that Timothy Beaumont's life, if it ever really existed in any real way, seems to be slipping gently back into the world bit by bit, too. Kelly vanished from Eddie's call log the second he said his real name out loud, and when Eddie googled him, he found a LinkedIn profile for a receptionist in Pasadena, who according to the internet, has worked at a yoga studio for almost six years. Never at a grief counselor's office. Same guy, though. Hair's a bit longer, maybe. 

The apartment is gone, occupied by someone else, which means it's a really great thing that Eddie's got friends with a boat. The other details Eddie can recall, from his brief stint in this made up guy's life, are similarly vanished, eerily erased - the lawyer he was supposed to meet with is, in fact, a lawyer, but currently has no malpractice cases on his docket. The articles about Timothy Beaumont Richie had found are now gone. The fast and loose, too casual office is actually a gift shop for beach tourists, in operation for at least three years, according to their website. Eddie gets the heebie jeebies just thinking about it. 

A gift, Eddie thinks? A doorway back into the world. He'll fucking take it. _Timothy Beaumont, wherever and whoever you are, thanks for that, bud. A real solid. Appreciate it._

He misses Richie, but also - it's sort of, kind of like, a good thing. He thinks. That they've been apart. Well, he tells himself that, anyway. Richie was really fucked up about it all, Bev and Ben tell him. That had been part of what they'd been fighting about in the first place, it turns out. Disagreeing over how to get Richie to move in with them, because they were both freaked out and worried that he'd hurt himself. 

"Not - I mean, he wouldn't," Eddie stammers, taken aback. 

"Not like that, honey, just - he drank a lot," Bev says uncomfortably. "You didn't - maybe you couldn't tell. You were only around him a couple days, and things were - "

"No, I could tell he drank," Eddie says darkly. 

"I was trying to get him to go to AA with me, like trying to trick him into it," Ben says, rolling his eyes at himself. "Which didn't work, of course, because he's not an idiot. But he was like, drunk dialing us at three in the morning, ranting, not making any sense - he'd be fine one day and then he'd just _lose_ it the next, it was just like, erratic."

"Scary," Bev supplies, her face drawn. "He was scaring us."

Eddie isn't sure he wants any more details than that. Not until Richie is willing to tell him, anyway. 

Most days, Eddie feels okay. He hasn't gotten in touch with Myra, or his work. He'd reached out tentatively to his lawyer, a little afraid to ask about what Myra might have done to his finances, who responds with such swiftness and palpable relief that Eddie gets the feeling that she, at least, was beginning to become concerned. It says something very deeply sad about Eddie's life, over the past ten years or so, that he could've disappeared for five-ish months and the only person who didn't just unquestionably _assume_ that Eddie had ditched his entire life to run away to Europe or whatever was the woman who managed his 401k. 

It's sort of like, if Eddie had to describe it succinctly, waking up from a dream. Like he went through something, and had a bad trip, but he's okay now. Awake, and everything. Mostly himself, and gathering the rest of the pieces up bit by bit. He talks to Bill and Mike on the phone, and eats breakfast and lunch and sometimes dinner, when they're not out on a date night together somewhere, with Ben and Beverly. The yacht is docked in Marina del Rey; it's not like they're sailing around anywhere. Eddie has his own little bunk, and a car that belongs to Ben's firm that he uses, and sometimes, late at night, Richie calls him. 

The first few times he was drunk, and then a few more times after that he was crying. Eddie usually doesn't say much, he just listens. He lies there in bed, one hand over his heart, and listens to whatever Richie wants to say - usually it's just nonsensical. Long monologues about rush hour traffic, or the singularly painful experience of auditioning for Netflix, which is apparently like a whole Thing that Eddie just doesn't understand, never having had to endure it himself. Sometimes he launches into these halfhearted, sort of funny bits that are clearly in-progress leftovers from his sets, and sometimes he just rambles - jumps from topic to topic, anything from the different ways to load a dishwasher to his favorite restaurants in San Francisco to his opinions on men's fashion. 

He doesn't call Eddie by his name - any name. Doc, or Eds, or otherwise. He's working up to it, though, Eddie can tell. It's okay though, because Eddie's got plenty of time now.

"Do you think, like do you wonder sometimes, if maybe we're all, you know," Richie says one night, his voice scraped raw from a night out with Bill and Audra, which he'd told Eddie about in very close detail. Audra had worn a very expensive dress that Bill promptly spilled beer on, not even ten minutes into the meal. She must love him very much, because she didn't even get mad! Wait until you meet her, she's a real knock out. 

"All what?"

"All dead," Richie says bluntly, but also sort of casually, like the word doesn't mean anything. "You know. Zipped up, vamoosed. We all kicked it down there together, and this is all just...afterlife. The ending after the ending."

Eddie thinks about that for a second, trying to figure out whether that freaks him out, or if he should feel concerned about Richie for asking that. He decides that he doesn't. "Well, who cares if it is? It's not so bad."

Richie laughs, a little huffy thing that sounds sort of bitter. "Yeah. Not anymore."

Eddie lets that sit for a long second, hoping that Richie can tell how much Eddie wants to hug him. If he could say it without freaking him out, Eddie would. He sort of hopes Richie can hear it in those silences anyway, that he can still tell somehow, all those things he's going to say one day, once Richie is ready to hear them. "I would end up stuck in heaven with you," he teases lightly. "Figures."

" _We're too brave to die_ ," Richie says, in his Gary Cooper voice. 

"Was that a quote? Were you quoting?" Eddie asks. "For the last time, I'm not watching your boring WWI movie. I don't care how much of it you monologue to me."

" _You're a fine girl, a brave girl!_ " Richie continues, breaking a little into laughter by the end of the sentence. "Okay, no, you don't have to watch it. It's actually not _that_ good, my dad just really liked Gary Cooper."

"He was handsome," Eddie comments mildly. "Him and Jean Arthur in _Mr. Deeds Goes to Town_?"

"I always forget that the Jimmy Stewart version was a sequel," Richie says. "You know, they offered me a part in the Adam Sandler one."

"No way," Eddie says. 

"Yeah, I was going to play Winona Ryder's work friend who had this drooling crush on her. Only like three scenes, and most of it was like, me rubbing off on the back of her office chair and mouth breathing. I was going to take it but then they did some rewrites and expanded the role, and it was an Adam Sandler gig so it ended up going to one of his buddies."

"You feel very spiritually right for Adam Sandler movies," Eddie says, and Richie barks out a surprised laugh. "Like it just feels fitting. Very on brand."

"Fuck you," Richie says, still laughing a little. He doesn't keep it going, though - he doesn't, often, not anymore. Eddie lets the conversation slide into silence, content to just lay there and listen to Richie breathe, and gather his thoughts. "You know, man, I - " Richie cuts off with a weird noise, like a hum. "I keep thinking about the bar. That first day. You know what I'm talking about?"

"Yeah, of course. I remember," Eddie says. 

"If I hadn't followed you. If I'd just been like, _oh shit this guy's nuts,_ and then went home. What would've happened? What _could've_ happened?"

"I would've gone after you, obviously," Eddie says. "I was um, frustrated. Upset. But I knew you would follow me. And you did."

"I almost didn't," Richie says. 

"Yeah, but you did," Eddie says. "I never would've...walked away from you if I didn't think you would follow, Rich. Not ever in my life."

Richie makes a hurt noise, like a wet gasp. Eddie clutches the cell phone tightly, pressing it hard against his head. 

Of course the one place Richie couldn't follow, Eddie thinks, is the one place Eddie came back from. Sort of poetic. 

"I'm getting," Richie starts, and then has to stop to clear his throat, so he can finish without his voice breaking. "I'm buying the place out in Anaheim, I decided. Pulled the trigger."

"That's great," Eddie says gently, his grin stretching wide across his face. "I liked that one the best. Good light."

"And I fired Steve."

"For good?"

"Yeah, man. Forever." Richie sighs. "Feels fucking great."

Eddie's not a huge fan of Steve. His grin gets a little bigger. "You got a balcony? At this new place?"

"Baby, I have _two,_ " Richie says, and Eddie shudders so hard his knees twitch. "I'll show you when, um. When the sale clears and everything, maybe. The old owners get like a month and a half to move out, but after that it's all mine."

"Can't wait," Eddie says honestly, squeezing his fist against his thigh, his throat closing up. 

"Yeah, I'll show you. I'll let you decorate," Richie says, laughing wetly. It sounds like a promise. "With your fucking Etsy tables, and everything."

"Okay," Eddie says patiently, "you're going to fucking love my Etsy table, okay. My lawyer is getting it back from Myra and you're gonna shit yourself, Rich. It's amazing. You're never gonna want to eat anywhere else."

Richie is laughing, which Eddie feels really proud about. It always feels like he did something good, accomplished something, when he makes Richie laugh like that, uninhibited and real. "I don't eat food at tables. Who am I, the Queen of England?"

"Okay, we're gonna fucking work on that too then, you dirty asshole," Eddie says, and Richie collapses into laughter again. "I'll make you an omelette every morning, dickwad, and it's gonna be so good you'll never skip breakfast again. At my fucking farmhouse antique dining room table set, Richie. Get fucking ready."

"I'm gonna hold you to that," Richie says, still laughing in delight. He sounds like he did when he was a little kid - high pitched and a little unhinged, always on the edge of hysteria. For all that's changed about him, there are still some things that Eddie recognizes, that have stayed completely the same. "The 'making me breakfast every day' thing. You said it, so you're doing it. That's it, that's happening."

"Yeah," Eddie says, smiling up at nothing. Smiling just because. "I really hope so."

**Author's Note:**

> this was written in exchange for a donation by falsettodrop to a bail fund/restorative justice charity currently working to aid local communities during the ongoing protests. If you'd like a fic written by me in exchange for a donation to a bail fund or street-level community org, get in touch with me at moirariordan @ gmail dot com.


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